Publish, Don't Perish: Ten Tips

Going public with our research is an important part of the research process. Besides the intrinsic value of sharing our experience and our insights with a community of peers, in higher education, publishing is vital for job security and promotion. Despite these forces encouraging us to publish, few academics actually do.

Reports from all over the world reveal that the publication rate among scholars is low. Academics in South Africa and Australia, for example, publish an average of 0.4 articles per year (Gevers 2006; McGrail, Rickard, and Jones 2006). The importance of publication compared to the relatively small numbers of teachers and scholars who publish, however, is an issue not only for tenure-track professors at universities; kindergarten through twelfth-grade (K–12) teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL), EFL administrators, and TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) professionals have experience and ideas that could be more broadly shared in outlets from newsletters to academic research journals.

Researchers have identified a number of explanations for why publication rates are so low, including time constraints, inadequate skills, and lack of institutional support. Among academics for whom English is an additional language, the challenges of writing for publication are even more complex (Benfield and Feak 2006; Uzuner 2008). English as an additional language (EAL) students and academics face difficulties because of unfamiliarity with genre patterns and the structure of articles in English journals that are generated in cultural contexts different from their own (Hyland 2003). EAL scholars must learn the unwritten “rules of the [publishing] game” as it is played in academic journals of the English-speaking world (Gosden 1992, 136).

The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to identifying the hidden rules and explicating the sometimes intimidating world of publishing. It focuses on the journal article genre, but the insights and advice are useful for teachers and scholars both inside and outside the university. For example, K–12 teachers who wish to share lessons from their classroom experience or EFL administrators who want to publish their observations and practical solutions will find helpful suggestions. The article presents a tool for teaching about publishing in a way that can benefit teachers and scholars who are interested in getting their ideas into print. It will assist younger academics who have never published before and will serve as a refresher course for senior academics who have already published. The article begins with an overview of the literature on obstacles to writing that academics face. We then offer ten practical tips for overcoming these barriers in order to get articles published.