Author guidelines are a very important factor in the submission process. We’ve talked a lot about the idea of improving publication processes. Whether it is simplifying the workflows that your team deals with on a day-to-day basis or streamlining operations with a journal management system, there are many ways to improve efficiency.
But there is always a very specific part of the submission process that you have very little control over. Not only that, but that part of the process can have a significant impact on how long things take. Having stressed the importance of author guidelines, there’s a small problem with them.
They don’t always get followed.
There’s a lot of reasons why this is the case, and some of these things can be addressed. Unfortunately, sometimes authors might be in a rush. Other times, authors might simply not have seen the guidelines. Author guidelines aren’t always universal—sometimes if an author originally applied to a different journal, that journal might have had different guidelines.
At the end of the day though, a journal should do everything in it’s power to make sure that the guidelines for authors are clear.
Why do author guidelines matter?
Publishing research is important. In many cases, it is of critical importance for an author(s) career. People want to get their research out into the world as soon as possible. From the point of view of the journal, there is also a drive to publish quickly.
The motivations are different, but the end result is the same. In a large ocean of publishers, clear guidelines can help smaller journals with more limited resources to tackle things that they need to address.
Author guidelines are a series of instructions that help to make the publishing process faster by removing unnecessary roadblocks. For example, common in almost all author guidelines will be basics such as “ensure that files are in X format” or “ensure that a references section is included”. If a submission does not meet these criteria, the journal will need to reject (or at the very least pause) the submission. The subsequent back and forth eats up valuable days that could be better spent on the peer-review process, for example.
Why guidelines are important for authors
As noted above, authors are often under a significant amount of pressure to publish. Clear guidelines can help authors understand two crucial things:
- What the journal expects;
- and what the authors need to do.
This might look like this:
- The journal expects that submissions will be using the Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) format and in a single file.
- As such, the authors need to ensure that all text, graphics, and references are in a single Word document.
Authors can help to prevent delays by ensuring that they carefully review the guidelines and check off everything that they need to do (more on this in a moment).
Checklists for authors
One way to simplify the process for authors and ensure that everything is ready is to provide a checklist. This checklist can be either mandatory or optional, but can help keep an author’s submission organized.
Much like author guidelines, though, a checklist is only useful if it is used. Making sure that the checklist (and the author guidelines) are mentioned in communication with the authors is a good idea to ensure that your team is doing everything that it can to ensure that the guidelines are followed.
Using a checklist is also a powerful tool to help small- to medium-sized journals as they do not need to devote a great many resources to performing tasks that can be accomplished by the authors. The more things that can be outsourced to the authors for their submission, the less strain there will be on already-limited resources.
How to prepare guidelines (so that they’re followed)
At their core, guidelines are designed to accomplish a specific task—to make the submission (and publication) process as easy as possible.
They are critical to ensure that neither the authors nor the staff are missing valuable details. But it is sometimes easy for author guidelines to turn into a long list of (sometimes) trivial things. When assembling author guidelines, the best thing to do to start is to determine the most critical things that are needed. This might include, file formats, references, whether or not a cover letter is needed, author information, and so on. Some submissions might want extra focus placed on an abstract. Others might not.
It is important for you and your team to determine the most important details that are needed.
Once this list is compiled, you can review it to see how long it is. The longer a list is, the more prone it is to errors during submission. If your list is reasonably short, you can start to add a “wish list” of things that you’d like authors to do (but that aren’t the most important things). This might include, for example, that the manuscript be formatted according to journal requirements.
Make your guidelines accessible
Once you’ve got your guidelines set up, the next step is to make the easily accessible. Author guidelines should be prominently displayed on an “Information for Authors” page. It might also be something that you can include in correspondence with authors in the early stages of submission.
You might also go so far as to require authors to tick off a box that says “I have read the author guidelines and confirm that the manuscript has been prepared using the guidelines” before authors are able to submit the manuscript for review.
There are many different options, you need to choose the one that works best for you and your team.
Enforcing guidelines
This is a tricky question. How much should you be enforcing the guidelines? Remember, small- and medium-sized publishers do not have the same resources that larger companies have. As such, you’re going to need to be careful on what guidelines you set and how much you can enforce them.
The truth is that this question is very important. It will help to establish the tenor of your submission process—both for your team, as well as for the authors. Will you be relaxed about them? Will you be extremely strict? Whichever one you pick will not be as important as another decision, though.
Making sure that you apply your guidelines consistently is critical. Authors and your team need to know what to expect. If something is in the author guidelines, but is routinely ignored by your team, why is it in the guidelines? If your guidelines are being met, but further requests are being made that aren’t in the guidelines, why is that? Consistency is absolutely critical to ensure that authors are able to understand and deliver on the items in the guidelines.