Editors often take part in group discussions at international conferences, when they present their journals and field questions from (largely younger) researchers eager to see their work in print. These sometimes lively sessions are always of interest, since they bring to editors' attention the many concerns that potential and experienced authors have about such matters as how to interpret rejection letters, how to respond to ‘revise and resubmit’ verdicts, or how to turn a piece of work written as part of a university course or a larger research project into an acceptable journal article.
Over the last 30-plus years in which I have edited journals I have produced at such meetings various checklists of do's and don'ts, based on long experience, which have sometimes proven to be helpful to young scholars wishing to publish their papers and to those advising them. At the CIES meeting in Washington DC earlier this year my personal list of potential problems in submitted papers looked something like this:
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wrong journal;
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too long/short;
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journalism;
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extract from report/dissertation unadapted;
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no clear topic;
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too little context;
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too little theory;
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clear gaps in literature;
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polemical;
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research not fully explained;
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failure to relate findings/conclusions to aims/theory/literature;
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language/style not checked;
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text not proofread;
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not ‘situated’ in comparative education;
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plagiarism/legal issues.
Many of these problems of course are easily solvable during the writing process. Journals will have advice on what kinds of papers they publish, and on length and conventions. Sending a paper to the ‘wrong’ journal is easily avoidable if some preliminary investigation of the potential journals is undertaken. Issues with language and style must be resolved before submission, especially in the case of those writing in English as a foreign language. The best advice is to have texts thoroughly and ruthlessly checked by native speakers with knowledge of writing for publication. Failure to proofread a submitted text should never occur.
Academic journal articles are quite distinct in style from pieces of journalism and from the kind of writing in commissioned reports or even in dissertations and large research projects (where there is the luxury of writing at length.) And academic articles are not usually polemical in nature, unless the research is so well conducted and presented that a very clear political (etc.) stance can be defended.
Some of the other problems in the list are ones which give editorial boards considerable concern. Each paper should address a clear topic, each paper should attempt some situation of the topic within a context (which might need to be described in detail for a wide general readership); each paper should draw critically on up-to-date literature and attempt some theorisation of the topic in question. Papers that deal with empirical data should explain the methods used in clear and sufficient detail (choice of locations, sampling, data gathering, data analysis, etc.) and with consideration for non-specialist readers. And conclusions should relate to a paper's clearly stated aims, to the initial discussion of theory and its supporting literature, so that it can be shown that something has been achieved that adds to knowledge of the topic covered.
Papers intended for a journal concerned with comparative education in particular, need to be ‘situated’ in comparative education as a field of inquiry. This is essential, since there is so often the criticism, during the review process, that a paper is not sufficiently, or even apparently, ‘comparative’.
There will no doubt be all sorts of further advice that will be given at journal editors' meetings, always with the aim of encouraging more articles of good quality to be sent to journals like Comparative Education. The papers in this general issue of Comparative Education have all been through a process of review by the whole editorial board, and each author has responded to feedback suggesting revisions of various kinds. Each paper demonstrably avoids the kinds of problem discussed above.