The first barrier in my publication journey

In this story, Nadia Ben Amer, who holds a PhD in English Language Teaching, talks about the first time she sent an enquiry to a journal editor.

Publishing a paper in a journal is every researcher’s dream and it was mine, too! When I started working towards achieving this goal, I realized that this involved not one, but many steps along the way. I’d like to share a short experience about one of these milestones that is an integral part of journal publication.

I think one of the BIGGEST steps in journal publishing is that of sending a pre-submission enquiry to a journal. And this is what I dreaded most!

Let me share some inside information — if you are a researcher, there is nothing else more intimidating than writing to a journal editor. But I knew that I had to do it. I had to approach journal editors asking them if my paper was suitable for consideration by their journal.

I mustered the courage, pulled up my socks, and wrote to the editor of my target journal to check whether my paper would be considered by them.

What followed was the astute observation that the seconds tend to tick away rather slowly when you’re waiting to hear from the journal editor. I was worried and played a thousand negative scenarios in my head about the fate of my paper.

But this was not an endless wait and the journal editor replied positively, saying that my paper would be considered for publication. Imagine my relief!

Suddenly the knot in my stomach had dissolved and I felt like I had just achieved something great. In fact, I developed a thirst for more and was ready to tackle this all over again. I could now fearlessly write to journal editors without worrying too much about the outcome.

My confidence increased greatly after this experience. I realized that all I needed to do was to break that first barrier. This brought in calmness and gave me the confidence I needed to pursue more projects.

My first attempt inspired me to try again and again to achieve my goals.

And once I saw my name on a published journal article, I was on cloud 9! I realized that publication success could be a bit hard to achieve but I had learned a lot from the process and even come to enjoy it!