Learning how to extract a journal article for publication amounts to a crucial skill. Only 10% of the journal articles presented for publication are accepted by credible journals because of failure to meet the requirements. A journal article presented for publishing require to meet certain criteria. Although most publishers provide specified criteria that journal articles must meet, a high quality and informative journal article should meet certain important elements for it to be accepted. This guide provides the necessary elements that journal publishing sites want to see and a step-by-step guide that will ensure your article journal is one-off process.
- Write a brief abstract (125-250 words)
An abstract should be a summary of the whole article. What this means is that by the time the reviewer or reader reads your 250-word abstract, he or she knows what your published journal article is all about. It doesn’t mean that you write 5-page paragraph of an abstract; when being trained on how to extract a journal article, attention is given to the abstract because of its centrality in enabling understanding of an article at a glance. Readers would only take time downloading and reading pdfs that they know have specific content that they are looking for. This means that the abstract must have an introduction, literature review, methodology, findings and conclusions. You need to pick key elements of each section and place it in the abstract. Do not forget to include the key words just below the abstract. Focus your abstract only on the variable that you have chosen to create a journal article for. The mistake that most authors do when extracting journal articles is copy-pasting the whole abstract from their theses or projects.
- Make your introduction as clear as possible (1-2 pages)
The introduction should clearly communicate the background information, problem statement, justification and rationale of the phenomenon being investigated. Journal article publication sites do not expect you to copy-paste the whole sections of the introduction as they appear in the project or thesis. However, you summarizes each section into small paragraphs because writing too much content in the introduction may lead to lack of balance in the sections and make the journal article too large. The key idea here is that you should ensure that by the time the reader goes through your 2-3 page introduction, they have a grasp of the background to your study, a problem that motivated your study, why the study is necessary and aims and objectives of the study. The problem of the study should feature a brief and concise reflection of both conceptual and empirical gaps.
- Critique the literature review (4-5 pages)
You journal article should be based on a particular background of previous study. In the literature review section, chief editors tend to check if you have comprehensively defined your concepts (conceptual review), included a conceptual framework (diagram), discussed theories underpinning your study (theoretical review), and critiqued previous research (empirical review). Consistencies and inconsistencies in the previous findings should be identified and explained. Keep the sources that you analyze because you will need them later in your findings discussion to support the results from your study. When writing literature review, ensure that the previous studies and any other content reviewed exhibits consistency with the phenomenon being investigated. If your literature is not relevant, journal publishing firms may reject your journal article. Since you are extracting an article for a single variable from your study, you need to focus on literature that is related to the specific variable that you have chosen. Do not summarize the whole literature review section.
- Identify and justify your methodology (2-3 pages)
In this section, you are required to identify your research design. The research design chosen for a given study should be relevant to the phenomenon being investigated, the target population, and the context of the study. For example, journal publishers may doubt the credibility of findings from a study that used self-administered questionnaires to collect data from a sample of aged people (such as above 70 years) or an illiterate population because most of them cannot read and write. At the same time, interviewing 100 university students using unstructured questionnaires may be subjected to doubt. The methodology section should also identify your research philosophy, population, sampling and sampling techniques, data collection instruments and procedures, data analysis and presentation techniques, and ethical considerations of the study. Remember to maintain brevity and clarity to enhance quality of the methodology. You can summarize each element in one sentence or two. Sample and sampling processes should be very clear because any confusion may lead to rejection of your journal article by publishing firms.
- Clearly present your discussion of findings (4-5 pages)
In this section, journal publishers you have approached for your journal article publication could like to see summarized results from your study. Similar to other sections, what you are doing here is that you are extracting a journal article for a given variable. When explaining how to extract a journal article for publication, Victoria Reyes emphasized that your findings section should reflect the same, meaning that the extracted journal article should reflect the specific variable. When working with three or four variables, some of your tables will bear results for all variables in a single table. In this case, you need to pick only results for the specific variable you are focusing on. However, general sections such as response rate and demographic details of the respondents will remain the same. Ensure you present the findings step-by-step to make them more appealing and understandable. Use figures, tables and graphs to summarize your data. While some journal publishing sites allow authors to analyze and discuss findings in the same section, other publishers may require a different section for findings presentation and another section for discussion. Either case, you need to know exactly what you are presenting and how you are presenting it.
- Write a compelling conclusion (2-3 pages)
The role of the conclusion section is to show how your work advances the field from the present state of knowledge. While in some publishing sites it is a separate section, other journals require it to be the last paragraph in the section of findings discussion. In either case, your introduction provides an opportunity for reviewers and readers to judge your work. Journal editors also use the conclusion section to determine whether your work merits publication in the journal or not. One of the most common mistakes that authors do in this section is repeating the abstract or creating a list of experimental results. Journals publishers do not accept trivial statements from your results section. The expectation here is to provide a clear scientific justification of your work and indicate possible uses and extensions if appropriate. Do not forget to include paragraphs for recommendations and suggestions for future research. When writing the conclusion, propose present global and specific conclusions in relation to the aims and objectives included in the introduction.
- Include a list of references in alphabetical order
References include all the sources of information that you used to write your paper. Use the proper referencing style when placing them in this section. The most popular referencing style is American Psychological Association (APA), Harvard, Modern Language Association (MLA), Chicago and OSCOLA.
Having followed the above seven (7) steps, you have known how to extract a journal article for publication and your journal article could now be ready for publication. Search and select the most credible sites and publish with them. It is also worth noting that your work is meant for academics and practice; hence, ensure you publish work that won’t lead to wrong decisions or deception and drag your name to it. You can search for more guidelines about how to extract a journal article for publication here.