This is disappointing as there exists thousands of papers, blog posts, video tutorials, and other forms of informal advice readily available online to guide prospective authors^[ii]; indeed, JASIST’s publisher, Wiley, has developed a collection of author resources. Contributing to this wealth of resources, reflecting on three years of service as JASIST’s Editor-in-Chief, and building upon 25 years of editorial experience (and 30+ years as an author), here are seven action items to help those submitting to JASIST develop manuscripts that will thrive in peer review. These tips may also be useful for authors submitting to other venues.

(1) Read the editorial remit.  Many manuscripts returned without further consideration fall outside the Journal’s editorial focus. In the same way that writing in English does not make a manuscript suitable for a journal about English, simply mentioning ‘information’ – or noting that information is a concept in analyses – does not mean that a manuscript fits JASIST. Likewise, even if the manuscript mentions topics of great interest to the Journal (e.g., artificial intelligence, social media, knowledge management, science or research policy, human behavior, information security, or knowledge-based work), the Journal is looking for an informational focus from the manuscript.

Simply put, to thrive at JASIST, the manuscript’s contributions should advance what is known about the “… production, discovery, recording, storage, representation, retrieval, presentation, manipulation, dissemination, use, and evaluation of information and on the tools and techniques associated with these processes.” If a manuscript’s contributions are not directed toward these goals, then it is unlikely to be advanced to peer review.

(2) Show how your work connects to and extends what is published in the Journal. It is vital to read the Journal and find papers that connect to your work. The work published in a Journal draws scholars together into a mediated discourse—a scholarly conversation—which is a core element of the epistemic community of science.^[iii] The editorial practices of the Journal are visible in all its topics and methods of interest, the literature being shared, and the focus and shape of its findings and discussions. If you believe the focus and contributions of your work “fit” the Journal’s editorial remit, the next step is to engage with what is published in this venue.

As you read the work published in JASIST, consider:

• There should be papers whose topics overlap with yours. This overlap may be a secondary aspect of the published work: Drawing this connection demonstrates your knowledge of the material. For example, when you make the case that author “A” in a published work at JASIST raises issues directly connected to yours in their discussion, you are showing that you are conversant with the relevant literature.
• Many of the topics of discourse in this Journal can also be found in related venues. Illustrating this connection advances the case for the relevance of your work. For example, noting that scholars A, B, and C who publish in the Journal and in others have focused on a topic of relevance to your work demonstrates your command of the literature.
• Conversely, if you add a few citations of papers published at the Journal to the start and end of your manuscript, this will be taken exactly as it appears: superficial. Reviewers will be put off by instrumental “citational sprinkling.^[iv]”

(3) Follow the Journal’s author guidance. The Journal provides guidance on scope, format and expectations for submissions. Manuscripts that do not follow this guidance are returned.  Indeed, a first indicator of a manuscript’s fit and quality is if it follows the author guidance.

As an international journal, published in English, more than half of the manuscripts submitted come from scholars whose first language is not English. The review team is sympathetic to this reality. This noted, poorly written manuscripts struggle in peer review. This is due in large part to poor writing causing difficulties in understanding the points being conveyed, as the central concepts and analyses of a paper are often complex and nuanced. Muddling your argument with low-fidelity writing is likely to magnify other concerns and lead to rejection.

To improve readability, consider using the services of a professional editor who is proficient in scientific writing.  Even as a native English speaker and writer, I routinely use professional editors. Software like Grammarly or generative AI systems can provide guidance for writing in English. This noted, these software often fall short in terms of providing well-written outputs for technical readers (and you would be wise to note this reliance in a footnote, given the real concerns for the undocumented uses of AI-generated—viz. AI-edited—text).

(4) Emphasize contributions. Make contributions clear in the abstract, opening paragraphs, manuscript body, and conclusion. There are many reasons to write a manuscript (i.e., motivations): Contributions are why people read a paper. Contributions can emerge from analyses of data, the uses of methods, or through exploration of a domain.  Write and edit the manuscript to focus attention on these contributions, making sure to:

• situate these in the literature;
• show how they emerge from the analyses;
• clarify how they stand clear from rival explanations and other interpretations; and
• stay on topic.

Writing with directness and clarity does not mean being simple or superficial. A contribution builds from the literature and the evidence through a carefully constructed analysis.  Stay with the main message and carry the reader through the findings.

(5) Draw on, and contribute to, information science. Due to a rapidly expanding number of scholarly papers and publishing venues, demonstrating awareness of relevant literature is becoming increasingly demanding and ever more important.  For JASIST, the expectation is that relevant literature may, in fact, come from beyond information science. This requires the authors to do the work to connect relevant literature from outside of information science to relevant literature of information science. A lack of connection to relevant information science scholarship will lead to the manuscript’s return without consideration.

(6) Provide an informative cover letter. The Journal requires a cover letter as part of every submission. It is a mechanism to help the editorial staff in positioning your work for review.  The cover letter should convey how the manuscript aligns with the Journal’s editorial remit. It should highlight how the contributions build from and extend information science, perhaps even listing the papers and topics that have drawn you to submit to this venue. And, while not required, please consider identifying editorial board members to serve as your review editor. An uninformative cover letter often suggests a poorly-prepared and poorly-positioned manuscript.

(7) Specific guidance for those whose work relies on interviews and fieldwork: This guidance is most relevant to scholars whose work builds on the phenomenological perspective of contextually-situated scholarship, which has often been generically labeled “qualitative.” Situated approaches to scholarly inquiry have existed for generations. The principles guiding contemporary qualitative work have been actively developing for decades^[v]. In line with the Journal’s desire to support this work, and reflecting experiences with this approach across my scholarly career and editorial roles, here are four suggestions for scholars submitting qualitative work:

1. Be clear about the goals of the work. Situated scholarship is often used to illuminate a particular phenomena or event that is sensical only within a specific context (e.g, changes in information access among a particular group). Some situated scholarship is done to trace events over time (e.g., the rise of open access publishing); to allow comparison of similar situations that vary by distinct characteristics (e.g., differences in the development and uses of shared data repositories); or, to represent instances of events that are common but deserve extended attention (e.g., online search). Each of these forms of situated scholarship pursues different kinds of knowledge claims and requires different explanations for sampling and data collection, but each may share analytic approaches (e.g., triangulation and grounded coding). Too often authors of qualitative are unclear relative to the phenomena examined and research design chosen.
2. Be clear about the sources of data and what can be learned from the findings. For example, a field researcher may follow a small number of participants over an extended length of time. As part of this approach, both participants and the researcher may interact with many others. Depicting such a situation as a case study or ethnography raises differing expectations of the collection and interpretation of evidence, as well as how the participants became part of the data effort. In contrast, a comparative study involving a few participants from several locations requires explanation of the selection choices. This particular situation also entails different limits on what can be reported. In situated scholarship, data are tied to the places and times of their collection, as such, findings must be considered relative to their value  in understanding the context or situation, then extending  beyond the context of the data collected.
3. Be clear about the analyses. Provide details about the coding scheme development, the mapping of evidence to codes, and the ways in which rival interpretations are winnowed down to the most supportable representation. Use tables and appendices to provide summaries and details. Field-oriented scholars often use too many words to advance epistemological positions while shortchanging their discussion of analyses. After decades of these approaches being used in information science, scholars must focus on doing the work rather than reminding readers of the epistemological and ontological premises of it, which can instead be served by citations and footnotes.
4. Know that what is possible in a journal article differs from what is possible in a monograph or conference paper. The Journal enforces a word count inclusive of all text but excluding cited works. This exerts some pressure on authors to decide what is most worth writing. Excluding cited works from the word count allows authors full engagement in the literature.  Scholars who use field-based methods often argue for “thick” descriptions and the importance of detailed contextualization. But, what is possible in a journal-length manuscript is different from what is possible in a monograph or book. This reality requires authors to consider what they need to include in a journal for submission to JASIST.

In sum, submissions with the following characteristics have a higher likelihood of thriving in peer review at JASIST:  (1) The contributions reported are made clearly and advance information science and/or the informational perspective; (2) The work both draws from and connects to the relevant literature of the Journal, information science, and other related scholarly spaces; (3) The manuscript reflects the Journal’s author guidance, including special attention to quality writing; and (4) The cover letter conveys all such points. And, for scholars pursuing work broadly considered ‘qualitative’ in approach, there are four suggestions to guide your writing, as outlined above.

Thank you for reading and we look forward to receiving your manuscript.

Works Cited

Daft, R. (1985). Why I recommended that your manuscript be rejected and what you can do about it. In L. Cummings and P. Frost, Publishing in the Organizational Sciences, Richard D. Irwin,  Homewood, IL, 193-209.

Davis, M. (1971). That’s interesting!: Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1(2), 309-344.

Golden-Biddle, K. & Locke, K. (2006) Composing Qualitative Research, SAGE Publications, New York.

Hirsch, J. (2005). “An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output”. PNAS. 102 (46): 16569–72. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507655102

Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Lee, A. & Liebenau, J. (1997) Information Systems and Qualitative Research. In: Lee, A., Liebenau, J., DeGross, J.I. (eds) Information Systems and Qualitative Research. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35309-8_1

O’Brien, B., Harris, I., Beckman, T., Reed, D. & Cook, D. (2014) Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research: A Synthesis of Recommendations. Academic Medicine, 89(9), 1245-1251. DOI: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000000388

Peacock, J. (1986) The Anthropological Lens: Harsh Light, Soft Focus. Cambridge University Press, New York. ISBN 9780521004596.

Woods, P. & Sikes, P. (2023) Successful Writing for Qualitative Researchers, Routledge, London, 3rd Edition. DOI: 10.4324/9781003143406

Hyperlinked (in footnotes)

Wiley author resources: https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/index.html

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of-academic-publishing-in-3-graphs-5-trends-and-4-thoughts/

Footnotes

^[i] Data make clear that the number of scholarly papers being published per year is growing at a near-exponential rate. The number of venues to publish academic work is also expanding.

^[ii] Beyond Wiley’s resources, have a look at what else is available. Here are two of my favorite sources on writing scholarly work. Both are 40+ years old and reflect my training in social science:

Daft, R. & Why, I. (1985). Why I recommended that your manuscript be rejected and what you can do about it. In L. Cummings and P. Frost, Publishing in the Organizational Sciences, Richard D. Irwin: Homewood, IL, 193-209.

Davis, M. (1971). That’s interesting!: Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1(2):309-344.

^[iii] For more, see:  Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999). Epistemic cultures: how the sciences make knowledge, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

^[iv] Two issues that authors often raise deserve specific attention. First is a concern that some venues demand explicitly to cite work from the target Journal as a requirement of publishing. This is not the case for JASIST: The point being made is connection to the relevant literature, not citing JASIST papers. Second, a demand that certain papers be cited to advance towards publication. While it may be that some papers are suggested by reviewers (e.g., it is hard to imagine moving forward on discussions of the h-index without citing Hirsch (2005)), the Journal will always defer to the submitting author(s).

^[v] There exists 100+ years of guidance for doing excellent field-based work. Here are five of my favorites:

Golden-Biddle, K. & Locke, K. (2006) Composing Qualitative Research, SAGE Publications.

Lee, A. & Liebenau, J. (1997) Information Systems and Qualitative Research. In: Lee, A., Liebenau, J., DeGross, J. (eds) Information Systems and Qualitative Research. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35309-8_1

O’Brien, B., Harris, I., Beckman, T., Reed, D. & Cook, D. (2014) Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research: A Synthesis of Recommendations. Academic Medicine 89(9), 1245-1251. DOI: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000000388

Peacock, J. (1986) The Anthropological Lens: Harsh Light, Soft Focus. Cambridge University Press, New York. ISBN 9780521004596.

Woods, P. & Sikes, P. (2023) Successful Writing for Qualitative Researchers, Routledge, London, 3rd Edition. DOI: 10.4324/9781003143406