How to submit

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• 11-05-2006
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Scope Bias

• Sources of this presentation
• Bias of personal research paradigm potential
  target journals

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Sources of this presentation

• Personal experiences
• Experiences from fellow researchers
• Interactions with current past editors
• Sternberg, R. (2000, eds.)
  Guide to Publishing in Psychology Journals

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Bias of research paradigm potential journals

• More psychology oriented
  (v.s. education oriented)
• Empirical quantitative research
  (v.s. review qualitative paper)
• Experimental in nature
• Mainly in domains of cognition

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Outline

• Conduct research
• Plan writing
• Analyze data
• Choose journals
• Write papers
• Submit papers
• Respond to reviews
• Rewrite papers
• Resubmit

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Conduct research

• Topics issues are important
• Major general issue
• Timely issue
• Local issue
• Topics that contain spice
• Your own perspective/theory

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Conduct research

• Fit into the research community is a good
  strategy to keep up topics
• Attend conference to promote yourself
• Exchange ideas through e-mails
• Search for collaborations

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Plan writing

• Can not plan write everything up and leave
  blank space for the results to be filled

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Analyze data

• Analyze data before we write
• Know what data tell provides an outline of the
  overall story of the article
• Many experiences writers write the results
  section first

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Analyze data

• Need to explore the data in general
• Think of data as a jewel
• You need to cut polish it !

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Choose journals

• Choose 2-3 relevant journals
• Some suggest from the most important
  influential ones, others dont
• Choose journals that make sense for your data,
  not the journal you planned earlier
• Write with those journals in mind

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Types of Educational Psychology Journals I have
in Mind

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Types of Educational Psychology Journals I have
in Mind

• British Journal of Educational Psychology
• Cognition Instruction
• Discourse Processes
• Journal of Educational Psychology
• Journal of the Learning Sciences
• Reading Research Quarterly
• Scientific Study of Reading

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Types of Educational Psychology Journals I have
in Mind

• Memory Cognition
• Journal of Memory and Language
• Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning,
  Memory, Cognition
• Behavior Research Methods

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Types of Educational Psychology Journals I have
in Mind

• Applied Psychological Measurement
• British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical
  Psychology
• Educational and Psychological Measurement
• Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics
• Journal of Educational Measurement
• Psychometrika

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Types of Educational Psychology Journals I have
in Mind

• Many developmental, special education, individual
  difference journals

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Some citation index for 2005
Abbreviated Journal Title 2005 Impact Immediacy 2005 Cited
Abbreviated Journal Title Total Cites Factor Index Articles Half-life
BEHAV RES METHODS 1632 1.124 0.115 61 9.7
BRIT J EDUC PPSYCHOL 805 0.81 0.054 37 gt10.0
COGNITION INSTRUCT 583 1.16 0.214 14 gt10.0
DISCOURSE PROCESS 608 0.643 0.6 25 8.9
J EDUC PSYCHOL 4133 2.235 0.089 56 gt10.0
J EXP PSYCHOL LEARN 6680 2.812 0.229 105 gt10.0
J LEARN SCI 401 2.792 0.231 13 gt10.0
J MEM LANG 3633 2.815 0.246 69 8.9
MEM COGNITION 4311 1.566 0.165 109 10
READ RES QUART 996 0.859 0.136 22 gt10.0
SCI STUD READ 339 1.529 1.647 17 5
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Write papers

• Good writing make a big difference
• APA journals accept 15-20 submitted manuscripts
• Among those, the differences are in writing
• Probably more than 60 depends on writing
• No one formula for good writing

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Write papers

• Good writing is good teaching
• Write for PSY 101
• Or write one level less specialized than your
  targeted audience
• Do not think that your audience are all experts
  although we write for professional journals

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Write papers

• Write with referees in mind
• Think the way your referees will think

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Write papers

• Proofread
• Ask colleagues to read the articles the way a
  referee would
• State clearly the problem and organize the
  article around it
• Cite likely referees

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Write papers

• Make clear up front what the new contribution
• Make clear how your work builds on that of others
• Anticipate likely objections to your
  interpretations of the data

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Write papers

• Analyze the data first
• Be accurate, clear readable
• Informative, scientific in spirit
• Tell a story on what you have learn from your
  study
• Do not tell not your personal history of still
  born thought

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Write papers

• Write simply and directly
• a short story with a single, linear narrative,
  not a novel
• omit needles words
• If your article is interesting and with style
  even better but not crucial
• Good organization
• in a shape of an hour glass

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Write papers

• Organization of a paper
• The introduction begins broadly
• It becomes more specific
• Until you are ready to introduce your own study
  in conceptual terms
• The method and results sections are the most
  specific
• The discussion section begins with the
  implications of your study
• It becomes broader

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Write papers

• Titles Abstract
• To capture attention
• For databases
• For Summaries
• First impression
• Should be self-explanatory

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Write papers

• Titles should include
• keywords
• theoretical issue addressed
• IV DV
• 12-15 words in length

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Write papers

• Abstract should include
• The problem
• Major hypotheses
• A summary of method
• A synopsis of the main results
• Conclusions implications
• Be 100-150 words
• Be coherent

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Write a title

• Limitations on Information-Processing capacity
  A Review of the Literature
• versus
• The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
  Some limit on our capacity for Processing
  Information

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Write an abstract

• Abstract
• The complexity of text comprehension
  demands a computational approach to describe the
  cognitive processes involved. In this paper we
  present the computational implementation of the
  Landscape Model of reading. This model captures
  both on-line comprehension processes during
  reading and the off-line memory representation
  after reading is completed, incorporating both
  memory-based and coherence-based mechanisms of
  comprehension. The overall architecture and
  specific parameters of the program are described
  and a running example is provided. Several
  studies comparing computational and behavioral
  data indicate that the implemented model is able
  to account for cycle-by-cycle comprehension
  processes and memory for a variety of text types
  and reading situations.

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Follow APA publication manual for other parts of
writings

• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Discussions

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Submit papers

• Do not submit until everything is ready
• Spelling
• Grammar
• Graphs
• References
• And everything

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Submit papers

• Never, never think to revise papers after been
  accepted
• Cover letter

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An example of cover letter

• Date
• Dr. XXXXXX
• Department of XXXXX
• University of XXXXX
• Official department address
• Dear XXXX,
• Enclosed please find five (5) copies of a
  manuscript entitled The effects of questioning
  on comprehension of narrative texts as a function
  of grade and questioning timing, which we would
  like to submit to the Journal of Educational
  Psychology. The research presented in this
  manuscript has not been published elsewhere. All
  data were collected in accordance with the
  ethical standards of the APA and those of the
  Institutional Review Board. The manuscript
  consists of 35 pages, including five tables, one
  figure, and two appendices. It you would need
  further information, please contact me at the
  address below.
• Sincerely,
• My name
• Name of my university
• Name of my university
• My official address here
• My e-mail

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Rewrite a paper

• Do not expect reviewers to discern your
  brilliance through the smog of polluted writing
• Not just change words or reorder sentences
• Sometimes discard a whole section
• Or start from a different perspective

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Rewrite a paper

• Rewriting is difficult
• Hard to edit ones own writing because of being
  unable to notice ambiguities and gaps

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Rewrite a paper

• Strategies to cope with rewriting
• Lay the manuscript aside for a while and come
  back later
• Read it out loud
• Role-play a novice reader
• Have I been told what this concept means?
• Has the logic of this step been demonstrated?
• Would I know what the independent variable is at
  this point?

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Rewrite a paper

• Give a polished copy to a colleague for a
  critical reading
• Do not argue with them if they find something
  unclear
• If you can have more than one critical reader,
  you are simulating reviewing processes

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Respond to reviews

• rejection is common
• For every paper published, there are likely to
  have been multiple submissions
• only 2 straight acceptance manuscript
• If receive a rejection letter
• Write a letter to the editor that says exactly
  what you want to say, then delete it

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Respond to reviews

• Sense the light behind the cloud
• Look at reviews to see if they contain anything
  of value
• Reviewers come in all varieties
• They would say different things about the same
  manuscript
• Editors base their decisions on the reviews but
  they are not bound by them

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Respond to reviews

• Respect reviewers
• Be humble to the point
• Sometimes need more experiments or reanalysis
• Rewrite, revise, revise and revise!

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Respond Resubmit

• If you earn an invitation of resubmission,
  consider a mild celebration
• Editors do not invite an author to revise and
  resubmit if the manuscripts chance of
  publications are less than 50

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Respond Resubmit

• Be polite in tone
• Be specific and considerate to the editor
• Be comprehensive
• Cover letter again

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Respond Resubmit (1 of 6)

• Dr. XXXXXX
• Editor-in-Chief, Behavior Research Methods
• Dear XXXXX,
• Attached please find the revision of
  Manuscript ID BR-Org-04-063 entitled "The
  computational implementation of the Landscape
  Model Modeling inferential processes and memory
  representations of text comprehension". We very
  much appreciate the constructive comments by the
  reviewers and by you. In the revision, we have
  taken into account all the comments and made
  changes accordingly. We believe that, as a
  result, the paper is much stronger.
  

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Respond Resubmit (2 of 6)

• Reviewer 1
• Reviewer 1 pointed out that we needed to
  clarify whether the paper is about the conceptual
  Landscape Model, the computational model, or both
  (the reviewer correctly inferred it is the
  computational implementation). We agree that this
  was indeed not clear and have edited the paper
  throughout to be clear about the distinction and
  about the fact that that the focus is indeed on
  the computational implementation.
• We appreciate the reviewers comment
  about the lack of journal publications on the
  computational model (and did not think the
  comment was nasty!). Here, the distinction
  between the Landscape Model and the computational
  implementation that the Reviewer mentioned is
  important. The conceptual Landscape Model has
  been very influential (as noted by Reviewer 2).
  The lack of journal publications relates to the
  use of the computational program, hence the
  purpose of this paper. Our aim is to present the
  computational implementation of the Landscape
  model. Given the wide acceptance of the
  conceptual Landscape Model, we believe that a
  computational implementation of this theory will
  provide much value to the scientific community.

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Respond Resubmit (3 of 6)

• We did want to respond directly to this
  concern, however, and have followed the
  reviewers suggestion to help readers see the
  potential of the LS implementation. Specifically,
  in the Conclusion section (p. 20-22) we have (a)
  provided more detail on the empirical support for
  the model and (b) included a brief discussion of
  the benefits of the implementation of the LS
  model as well as g a few concrete examples.
• In response to this Reviewers other
  comments we have made several minor modifications
  in the manuscript. We have included information
  about how users can obtain the software. We also
  clarified that in Figure 1 the symbols m and so
  on have predefined meaning (How to use the
  Landscape Model section (p.9-12). In addition, we
  clarified how the symbols in the program are
  defined and how the input units in Unit Area
  map onto the arrays in Activation Type Area.
• Reviewer 1 asked us to clarify whether
  the LS program indeed makes predictions. We
  revised the Conclusion section (p. 20-22) to make
  it clear that in the provided examples the
  implementation of the LS model is used to make
  predictions that are then compared with empirical
  data.

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Respond Resubmit (4 of 6)

• Reviewer 2
• In response to Reviewer 2s comments we
  have made it explicit in the Architecture section
  (p.6-8) that cohort activation follows a Delta
  rule. We chose to use the Delta rule because it
  is a supervised learning rule, unlike Hebbian
  learning which is an instance of the family of
  unsupervised learning rules, and therefore allows
  for asymmetrical connections between text
  elements in the final associative network.
• We agree with Reviewer 2s point
  concerning the alignment between constructionist
  theory and coherence-based retrieval and have
  made sure that none of our points contradict this
  (Architecture section, p. 6-8).
• Upon rereading the description of text
  units in the How to use the Landscape Model
  section (p. 9-12), we agreed with the Reviewers
  assessment that this was confusing. We revised
  this section to make it clear how text units are
  parsed and included in the model by giving
  concrete examples. We also clarified how the
  connection strengths are computed in the
  Activation Type Area. Furthermore, we defined
  the delta rule and sigmoid function in the Model
  Architecture section (p. 14-15), as suggested by
  the reviewer.

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Respond Resubmit (5 of 6)

• In trying to balance the comments between
  Reviewers 1 and 2, we decided to keep the
  examples of the empirical support for the
  computational model at the beginning of the
  paper, rather at the end. The primary purpose of
  this paper is to present the model and its basic
  functions and operations. For this reason, we
  have included data from sample simulations at the
  end. However, if the reviewers and editor feel
  that moving this to the front of the paper is
  preferable then we would be happy to do so.
• Finally, we appreciate the comment to make
  sure that the quality of the figures is good
  enough for printing and have double-checked this.

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Respond Resubmit (6 of 6)

• Reviewer 3
• The paper was revised according to the
  Reviewers suggestions concerning long sentences
  and repetitiveness (e.g., p.4-5, p.9). Also, we
  followed this Reviewers suggestions to explain
  cohort activation by giving conceptual
  descriptions and citing well-known research using
  the same leaning mechanism Architecture section
  (p.6-7) and in the Model Architecture section
  (p.13-14).
• Finally, in response to the Reviewers
  comment on the distinction between levels of
  representation and between cohort activation and
  coherence-based retrieval, we have clarified
  these relations in the last paragraph of the
  Architecture section (p. 8)

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Cover letter for Resubmission (1 of 4)

• Name of editor, Editor
• Address affiliated institute of editor
• Date
• Dear XXX,
• Enclosed please find four copies of the
  revised manuscript 99-021, with the slightly
  changed title Inferential questioning Effects
  on comprehension of narrative texts as a function
  of grade and timing. We would like to thank you
  again for your patience in our returning this
  manuscript to you. We also would like to thank
  the reviewers for their comments. We found them
  to be very helpful and constructive. We have
  addressed every comment and we believe that the
  result is a much more focused and much stronger
  paper. In doing so, we also have shortened the
  manuscript by several pages.

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Cover letter for Resubmission (2 of 4)

• We have thoroughly revised the
  Introduction section. We provide an extensive
  review of the most recent literature. As a
  result, we have placed the current study in the
  context of recent research on questioning and on
  reading comprehension. Moreover, we have
  followed Dr. Graessers advice to make a stronger
  statement about the possible role of attentional
  resource allocation/management. We strongly
  agree with his suggestion that such
  allocation/management is central to the observed
  effects of questioning. We have extensively
  modified the Discussion section in the same ways.
  In doing so, we also have provided an
  explanation of the finding that the younger
  children experienced interference from the
  questions. In formulating our explanation, we
  refer to other studies with similar findings and
  to the attentional resources, as suggested by the
  anonymous reviewer. Finally, we have heeded the
  cautions by both reviewers about conclusions that
  are too strong.

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Cover letter for Resubmission (3 of 4)

• In response to comments by each of the
  reviewers, we have clarified several other
  aspects of the current study. These include the
  use of recall and other measures to assess
  comprehension, the selection of questions and
  their locations in the text, the reasons for
  choosing the during- and after-reading
  questioning times, and the fact that causal
  relations are just one -albeit an important- type
  of semantic connections in narrative texts.
  Likewise, we have clarified various aspects of
  the design of materials, as requested by the
  reviewers.
• The Results section is thoroughly
  rewritten. The reviewers had provided several
  very useful suggestions for improving the flow of
  this section. Following these suggestions we have
  eliminated redundancies, rearranged the analyses
  to focus directly on the most central issues,
  and, in the process, eliminated the tables. The
  result, we feel, is a much crisper and more
  readable Results section. We also have
  double-checked the standard deviations. The
  reported values are correct and in line with
  those reported by other researchers. Moreover,
  the largest standard deviations were obtained for
  the youngest children, where the largest number
  of significant differences were observed. Thus,
  if anything, the standard deviations would have
  reduced the likelihood that we would have
  observed significant effects.

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Cover letter for Resubmission (4 of 4)

• We have reduced the footnotes and have
  included the questions used in this study in the
  text (in the Appendix) rather than as a separate
  table.
• In summary, the changes recommended by
  the reviewers have resulted in a shorter, tighter
  paper, that is much more strongly grounded in
  current theory. Again, we would like to thank
  the reviewers for their thoughtful and
  constructive comments.
• I am looking forward to hearing from
  you.
• Best regards for the new year.
• Sincerely,
• My name
• My e-mail contact phone number

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Handling rejections with grace if youve
experienced it

• Actually rejections happen very often!

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Publishing papers need tacit knowledge of how
to which might be quite different from that of
conducting good research
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A published paper is not necessarily a good paper
but an unpublished paper is generally not a
credible paper

• Publish, Publish, Publish!