The document outlines a workshop aimed at assisting academic writers in planning and preparing their papers for publication in journals, emphasizing the importance of understanding the target audience and selecting the appropriate journal. It discusses the need to clarify contributions, use effective writing techniques such as abstracts, and engage with discourse communities to enhance the relevance of their work. Additionally, it highlights the peer review process and offers guidance on how to align research and arguments with the expectations of specific academic audiences.

1. Planning a
paper
Pat Thomson
Nor-TED,
November
2019

2. Workshop One
• clarify the key
contribution the paper
will make
• choose an audience and a
journal
• decide on a working title

3. preparation
• You have your data, analysed
• You might use free writing as a means of clarifying what you want to
say
• You have worked with your theoretical or conceptual framing and this
may already be in written form, in chunks

4. Two types of academic writers
• Those who just start writing and a paper
eventually emerges
• Those who are planners and work to and
with a lot of pre-prepared thinking and
material – the approach this workshop
supports
(Sword)

5. the point
• Think about your paper as
providing an answer to a problem,
puzzle, debate or question. It might
be in policy, research, or practice.
• What will the reader know about
this problem, puzzle, debate or
question at the end of the paper
that they didn’t know before?
• Who is the reader who will be
interested in this - or who needs to
know this?

6. Choosing a journal means choosing readers
• Readership:
members of a
specific discourse
community
• They share overt
and covert norms,
narratives, truths,
shared
understandings and
texts

7. Text
Layer 1
Layer 2
Layer 3
Discourse practice
Editing and Refereeing
Sociocultural practice
three layer model of discourse: journals
Commercial publication requirements
Scholarly/disciplinary conventions, Open access?
The middle layer of
gatekeepers is not
entirely predictable.
However they are
likely to consist of at
least one insider
member of the
journal community
plus the editor

8. choosing a journal
If it is always choosing to write for a specific discourse
community then our task is to imagine writing to this
community of readers
• what do they talk about? what do they already know?
• what would they be interested in? How and where does
your idea fit?

9. Reading the discourse community
• The Editor and Editorial Board:
• Who are they? What do they write about ?
• The table of contents of a selection of issues
• What does the journal publish?
• Some abstracts
• What topics are covered? What topics are not?
• What key debates are being addressed?
• How clearly have the authors stated their position and their argument? How bold
and/or moderate have they been?
• What kinds of methodologies are used? What are not? Are there any obvious
preferences?
• Is there any evidence of the theoretical resources they draw on?
• How congruent do these seem with what is known about the discourse community
from the analysis of the editorial board?
• The mission statement

10. international journal of research and method
in education
Co-Editors:
Melanie Nind - University of
Southampton, UK
Liz Todd - Newcastle
University, UK
Book Review Editors:
Maria Pampaka - University of
Manchester, UK
Pam Woolner - Newcastle
University, UK

11. Editorial Board
Julie Allan - University of Birmingham, UK
Qing Gu – University of Nottingham, UK
Martyn Hammersley - The Open University, UK
Matt Homer - University of Leeds, UK
Godfrey Pell - University of Leeds, UK
Sarah Parsons - University of Southampton, UK
Keith Postlethwaite - University of Exeter, UK
Jo Rose – University of Bristol, UK
Kenneth Ruthven - University of Cambridge, UK
David Scott - Institute of Education, University of
London, UK
Jane Seale - University of Southampton, UK
Pat Sikes - University of Sheffield, UK
Emma Smith – University of Leicester, UK
Gary Thomas - University of Birmingham, UK
Pat Thomson - University of Nottingham, UK
Catherine Blaya - European Observatory of Violence in
Schools, France
Roseanna Bourke – Victoria University, New Zealand
Bagele Chilisa – University of Botswana
Kathy Hall - University College Cork, Ireland
Michelle Fine - City University of New York, USA
Francesca Gobbo – University of Turin, Italy
Patti Lather - Ohio State University, USA
Felix Maringe - U niversity of Witwatersrand, RSA
Erica McWilliam - National Institute of Education, Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore
Yngve Nordkvelle - Lillehammer University College, Norway
John O'Neill – Massey University, New Zealand
Birgit Pepin - University College Trondheim, Norway
Dominique Rivière - University of Toronto, Canada
Linda Smith - Waikato University, New Zealand
Larry Suter - National Science Foundation, USA
Mark Vicars - Victoria University, Australia
John Wallace - OISE, University of Toronto, Canada
Theo Wubbels - Utrecht University, The Netherlands

12. an issue
Doing close-relative research: sticking points, method and ethical considerations
Geraldine Degabriele Pace
Towards an adolescent friendly methodology: accessing the authentic through collective reflection
Mary Keeffe & Dorothy Andrews
Engaging with and moving on from participatory research: A personal reflection
Cath Gristy
Organization and visualization for initial analysis of forced-choice ipsative data
Jill A. Cochran
Randomized impact evaluation of education interventions: experiences and lessons from a reading to learn
intervention in East Africa
Moses Waithanji Ngware, Benta Abuya, Moses Oketch, Kassahun Admassu, Maurice Mutisya & Peter Musyoka
Book review Interpreting qualitative data
Eric Fletcher

13. Mission statement
The International Journal of Research & Method in Education is an interdisciplinary
and refereed journal, which draws its contributions from a wide community of
researchers. The principal aim of the journal is to further international discourse in
education with a particular focus on method.
The journal publishes contributions which:
• provide evidence of unusual or new methods of educational research
• discuss conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues in educational research
• have an international and/or comparative dimension
• contest or dissent from the orthodox or examine the innovative and the unusual
• are considered to be of major significance to those in the field of research
methodology in education.
The International Journal of Research & Method in Education encourages authors to
write in a lucid and accessible style. Contributors should take care to communicate to
an international readership of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners from a
range of disciplines including philosophy, sociology, economics, psychology, and
history of education.
Peer Review Policy:
All research articles in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, based on
initial editor screening and anonymized refereeing by at least two anonymous
referees.

14. indexing
• International Journal of Research & Method in Education is
abstracted/indexed in: Academic Search, Australian Research Council
(ARC) Ranked Journal List, British Education Index, EBSCOhost EJS,
Educational Journal, Educational Research Abstracts online (ERA),
Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) , European Reference
Index for the Humanities (ERIH), IBR (International Bibliography of
Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature on the Humanities and Social
Sciences), Research into Higher Education Abstracts, SCOPUS® and
Sociological Abstracts.

15. the Editors speak
LT: …the only thing I look for right at the beginning, is whether it’s relevant for the journal.
So – because with my job, isn’t to decide whether a paper should be published in the
journal because I pass them - all the papers - on to some reviewers and I select reviewers
for the paper. .. even if it is much more about Education than about methodology, if it’s got
some methodological warrant there and something that could be turned into
‘methodology’/‘methodological’, then we think our reviewers could help that process,
we’re happy to accept it.
In terms of advice for people who are wanting to publish for us and ‘what makes a good
article?’ I mean, I would say that really, try to think through what kind of point are you
making in your paper? You know, you’ve got to be making...
MN: ... developing a good argument...
LT: ...a good argument and it’s usually, probably about one particular point and not trying to
make too many points - But one, one particular point that you follow through and it could
be something that’s been done before, but are you doing something, are you adding to
that? Are you developing something conceptual about and something theoretical? And not
just describing how you do it. You know, there are some issues that we’ve looked at, papers
that we’ve had, where there’s been some issue that would be really, really useful but it’s
been done so descriptively with no... and it would’ve been really good to have had that in,
that issue in our journal, but because there wasn’t anything conceptual and it wasn’t really
thought about beyond the ‘how’ you do it, we couldn’t really keep it.

16. Decide on your target journal
Now note:
• What does this reader already know about your
topic?
• What does this discourse community expect to
read?

17. Title
• Must be searchable, so needs basic information
• Social science is often“catchy: straight”
• Encapsulate/anticipate the contribution – not just descriptive – can
usefully flag up the take home message
• Check out the titles in your chosen journal and then write your working
title.

18. Workshop two
• Write an abstract which
highlights the
contribution and shows
the key moves

19. Recap: What’s your contribution?
Does this matter to the journal discourse community and if so why and how?
What has been written in the journal before about this?
What’s my working title?

20. Writing abstracts (TINY TEXTS)
• Writing abstracts for academic journals is
not just a tiresome necessity of academic
life, BUT an excellent way to learn how to
write persuasively.
• Abstracts highlight issues of authority and
identity and are a rich site for
textwork/identity work.
• We call abstracts ‘tiny’ texts because they
compress the rhetorical act of arguing into
a small textual space BUT they are ‘large’ in
the pedagogical work they can accomplish.
• Kamler, B. & Thomson, P. (2006) Helping doctoral
students write: Pedagogies for supervision, p. 85-86.

21. The tiny text
LOCATE
1. context, connect with reader & the journal
2. the big puzzle, debate etc
3. what we know or don’t know – some of the warrant for the paper
FOCUS
this paper will… the particular focus and contribution
REPORT
the project and the results
ARGUE
1. how these results are to be explained
2. the implications of this explanation.

22. A little more madness in our methods? A snapshot of how the
educational leadership, management and administration field
conducts research
The field of educational leadership, management and administration (ELMA)
uses methods drawn primarily from cognate educational disciplines. But
does this matter? This paper sets out to find an answer to this question by
exploring the methods used in recently published papers through a snapshot
of six issues of six ELMA journals. The analysis showed a preponderance of
survey, interview and case study methods, with one journal, JEAH, also
publishing papers using methods drawn from history, philosophy and
sociology. The snapshot also revealed the methods that were rarely used –
for example, ethnography, visual and on-line methods. Through a
Bourdieusian lens, the paper argues that the ELMA field appears to be
removed from methods developments and debates in the wider educational
and social science fields. There may thus be mileage in the ELMA field
considering the use of additional methods, including the ‘wilder’ ones. The
field might also benefit from understanding methods as more than tools and
as practices possessed of a social life.

23. A little more madness in our methods? A snapshot of how the
educational leadership, management and administration field
conducts research
LOCATE The field of educational leadership, management and administration
(ELMA) uses methods drawn primarily from cognate educational disciplines. But
does this matter?
FOCUS This paper sets out to find an answer to this question by
REPORT exploring the methods used in recently published papers through a
snapshot of six issues of six ELMA journals. The analysis showed a preponderance
of survey, interview and case study methods, with one journal, JEAH, also
publishing papers using methods drawn from history, philosophy and sociology. The
snapshot also revealed the methods that were rarely used – for example,
ethnography, visual and on-line methods.
ARGUE Through a Bourdieusian lens, the paper argues that the ELMA field appears
to be removed from methods developments and debates in the wider educational
and social science fields. There may thus be mileage in the ELMA field considering
the use of additional methods, including the ‘wilder’ ones. The field might also
benefit from understanding methods as more than tools and as practices possessed
of a social life.

24. Hugs and behaviour points: Alternative education
and the regulation of ‘excluded’ youth
In England, alternative education (AE) is offered to young people formally excluded from
school, close to formal exclusion or who have been informally pushed to the educational
edges of their local school. Their behaviour is seen asneeding to change. In this paper, we
examine the behavioural regimes at work in11 AE programmes. Contrary to previous
studies and the extensive ‘best practice’ literature, we found a return to highly behaviourist
routines, with talking therapeutic approaches largely operating within this Skinnerian
frame. We also saw young people offered a curriculum largely devoid of languages,
humanities and social sciences. What was crucial to AE providers, we argue, was that they
could demonstrate ‘progress’ in both learning and behaviour to inspectors and systems.
Mobilising insights from Foucault, we note the congruence between the external regimes
of reward and punishment used in AE and the kinds of insecure work and carceral futures
that might be on offer to this group of young people.

25. Hugs and behaviour points: Alternative education
and the regulation of ‘excluded’ youth
LOCATE In England, alternative education (AE) is offered to young people formally excluded from
school, close to formal exclusion or who have been informally pushed to the educational edges of
their local school. Their behaviour is seen as needing to change.
FOCUS In this paper, we examine the behavioural regimes at work in11 AE programmes. REPORT
Contrary to previous studies and the extensive ‘best practice’ literature, we found a return to highly
behaviourist routines, with talking therapeutic approaches largely operating within this Skinnerian
frame. We also saw young people offered a curriculum largely devoid of languages, humanities and
social sciences.
ARGUE What was crucial to AE providers, we argue, was that they could demonstrate ‘progress’ in
both learning and behaviour to inspectors and systems. Mobilising insights from Foucault, we note
the congruence between the external regimes of reward and punishment used in AE and the kinds
of insecure work and carceral futures that might be on offer to this group of young people.

26. ‘Scaling up’ educational change: some musings on
misrecognition and doxic challenges
Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of
‘scaling up’. This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a
pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement ‘what
works’ across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu’s notions of misrecognition to
consider the current orthodoxies of scaling up. I argue that the focus on ‘process’ and
‘implementation problems’: (1) both obscures and legitimates the ways in which the
field logics of practice actually work and, (2) produces/reproduces the inequitable
distribution of educational benefits (capitals and life opportunities). I suggest that the
notion of misrecognition might provide a useful lens through which to examine reform
initiatives and explanations of their success/failure.

27. ‘Scaling up’ educational change: some musings on
misrecognition and doxic challenges
LOCATE Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of
‘scaling up’. This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a
pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement ‘what
works’ across all schools.
FOCUS AND REPORT In this paper, I use Bourdieu’s notions of misrecognition to
consider the current orthodoxies of scaling up.
ARGUE I argue that the focus on ‘process’ and ‘implementation problems’: (1) both obscures and
legitimates the ways in which the field logics of practice actually work and, (2) produces/reproduces
the inequitable distribution of educational benefits (capitals and life opportunities). I suggest that
the notion of misrecognition might provide a useful lens through which to examine reform
initiatives and explanations of their success/failure.

28. Abstract Skeleton ( in case you’re stuck)
• ….. is now a significant issue (in/for).. because…. . ( Expand by up to
one sentence if necessary)
• In this paper I focus on …..
• The paper draws on ( I draw on) findings from a study of… which
used…… in order to show that….. (expand through additional
sentences)
• The paper argues that….
• It concludes ( I conclude) by suggesting that…

29. After writing your abstract , examine it with your neighbour:
• How well is the work located in relation to broader discipline/policy/practice issues/problems?
Does it address the concerns of the discourse community of the selected journal?
• •Has the abstract focused the topic of the paper and identified the kind of research that was
undertaken? Is the focus clearly related to the more general problem or issue of concern to the
discourse community?
• •Does the abstract report the research that was undertaken, its methods and design? Does it
make the findings/evidence accessible to a broader readership and provide the key to the
argument that follows?
• •What is the argument? Is the So what question addressed? If not, what might it be? If yes, can it
be made stronger? Is there also a Now what?
• Are the four or five moves coherent? Are there connections between each of them? Is there a
discernible link between Locate and Argue?

30. Developing a road map to the paper
• Use your abstract as a planning tool
• Weighting of various sections
• A very common mistake – too much literature
• A very common mistake – not enough discussion
• A very common mistake – too little conclusion
• Frontloading and backloading (Dunleavy) = unbalanced articles

31. Hugs and behaviour points: Alternative education
and the regulation of ‘excluded’ youth
LOCATE In England, alternative education (AE) is offered to young people formally
excluded from school, close to formal exclusion or who have been informally pushed to
the educational edges of their local school. Their behaviour is seen as needing to
change.
FOCUS In this paper, we examine the behavioural regimes at work in11 AE programmes.
REPORT Contrary to previous studies and the extensive ‘best practice’ literature, we
found a return to highly behaviourist routines, with talking therapeutic approaches
largely operating within this Skinnerian frame. We also saw young people offered a
curriculum largely devoid of languages, humanities and social sciences.
ARGUE What was crucial to AE providers, we argue, was that they could demonstrate
‘progress’ in both learning and behaviour to inspectors and systems. Mobilising insights
from Foucault, we note the congruence between the external regimes of reward and
punishment used in AE and the kinds of insecure work and carceral futures that might
be on offer to this group of young people.
• INTRODUCTION, CONTEXT
THEORETICAL FRAME
• METHODS
• RESULTS 1.2.3
and
• DISCUSSION after each point
• CONCLUSION

32. Workshop Three
• Check you are publishable
• Develop a writing plan
• Either use bullet points or a
poster to start to add
content to write to.

33. Why reviewers/editors say they reject articles
• Lack of focus – saying ‘everything’, focussing on ‘nothing’,
succumbing to the temptation to compress all the ‘thesis’ or
research report into one article
• Not locating the contribution and the position - for a particular
audience, in relation to wider debates, the specific
conversation in this journal
• Poor organisation - not guiding the reader, poor headings, not
enough signposts or too many
• Failing to convince the reader – does not adequately deal with
the methodology
• Not significant - too local, done a lot, doesn’t add anything ( no
‘angle’)
• Sounding like a newbie rather than an equal – assumes
significance, sounds tentative, over-claims (fills the gap)

34. Well, good papers do tend to stand out quite quickly. They won’t be overly long or ridiculously short, they’ll have a title and an
abstract that tells you what the paper is about. A good abstract will tell you what the key issue that’s addressed is, it’ll give you
an idea of the methods that have been used and the conclusions that have been arrived at. So that abstract ought to tell
someone whether it’s worth them spending part of their life reading this paper. If the abstract doesn’t do that the chances are
the paper will have further weaknesses.
The main reasons why things are rejected from the journal are very consistent. I mean I’ve read thousands of refereed reports and
almost always something that’s rejected will fall foul of one of three things: the first thing is methods. If your paper covers any
empirical research that you’ve done whether it’s a survey, interviews, participant observations, even if it’s desk-based research
that you’ve analysed previous work, you have to tell the reader something about your methods. It doesn’t mean that the whole
paper has to be devoted to that but you have to give the reader a sense of whether they can trust you. How did you decide your
sample, what were the key questions you were looking at? Because the reader needs to know that basic information in order to
make sense of the rest of the paper.
So in addition to method you also need some awareness of what’s gone before. Again, you can’t review the whole of the relevant
literature but you have to give the reader some help. Tell them how what you’re doing relates to key work that’s gone before
and, if possible, how are you extending that work? So sometimes we’ll get a really good interesting piece of research but it’s
written as if no one has ever considered these questions before. Now, if the person had actually added a section which says
here’s the work that had been done previously, it allows them to then show how they’re building on that work.
So we need methods, we need an awareness of previous work and we really need the author to know what their point is. In lots of
papers it’s like the author hasn’t really made their mind up, they’ve got three, sometimes four ideas and they’re not quite sure
whether the paper’s about all of them or none of them. I think the strongest papers usually have one point to make and they
make that point powerfully, with evidence, and they locate it within the field. Very often I’ll get really interesting papers but
they’re not quite sure what they’re saying and often those things just need to be started again because they’re so disorganised
that it’s difficult to give clear advice on how you can change that. You know, you really need to sit down and work out what it is
you’re trying to say.
David Gillbourn (Editor: Race Ethnicity and Education)

35. I mean, I often, with students and with authors, suggest that they think, “Who’s the person I want to read this?
Who am I addressing?” Whether it’s an activist group in the community, the leading researcher in your field,
someone who you want to give you a job. Imagine who that person is and then imagine that you’ve walked
into an elevator at a conference or wherever, that person is in the elevator and the doors shut. You’ve got
ninety seconds with that person before they get out of the elevator. What do you want to tell them about
your research? You can’t tell them everything about it, you can’t, you know, spend three days telling them
about the intricacies of French philosophy and how it relates to what you’ve just done. You’ve got ninety
seconds; you need to work out what’s important about your work that you can give someone in ninety
seconds.
If you imagine that then you turn that into a paper. That will help you to identify ‘what is it that I want to write
about’ and then you take that and all the rest of it flows from that. What’s the appropriate title for the paper
that shows people that are interested in this this is where you come to read about it. And then how do I
structure the paper so that at the end of reading it the person feels they know exactly what I wanted them to
get from that ninety seconds in the elevator.
It sounds silly, it sounds deceptively simple but actually most people that are writing they’ll be writing up
research that’s taken a year, two, sometimes three years or more. Trying to actually distil that down into
something that makes sense quickly is a really hard job and it’s much better that you do it before you write
rather than sitting down and starting with the first page and then seeing where it goes because that’s where
you wind up with those lengthy articles that never really get to a point, that just kind of talk around issues.
Almost everything that’s rejected from the journal has fallen foul on the basis that it hasn’t discussed its
methods appropriately, or it hasn’t recognised that there is a relevant literature out there which needs to be
addressed, or it hasn’t been clear about what its key argument is.

36. Recap: the tiny text
LOCATE
1. context, connect with reader & the journal
2. the big puzzle, debate etc
3. what we know or don’t know – some of the warrant for the paper
FOCUS
this paper will… the particular focus and contribution
REPORT
the project and the results
ARGUE
1. how these results are to be explained
2. the implications of this explanation.

37. The
Contribution
Recap: the contribution

38. Recap significance: So what? Who
cares?
• Why does knowing ‘this’ matter?
• To whom?
• What other journals are they
reading?
• What will they expect me to refer
to, say and how will they expect me
to say it?

39. LOCATE: Bullying is a serious problem in schools.
FOCUS: This paper reports on a project in which the
authors worked with a group of secondary
students in an innovative school in the north of
England to research issues of bullying and safety.
REPORT: The student researchers used photographs
to stimulate conversations with focus groups of
their peers.
The data showed that while there was little
serious bullying in the school, there was an
everyday practice of name-calling, isolation, and
physical hassling associated with the formation
and maintenance of a hierarchy of sub-cultural
groupings in the school.
ARGUE: The students’ research not only challenges
the notion of bullying as necessarily involving a
perpetrator and victim, but also offers a lens
through which to examine the imbrication of
educational differentiation via setting, testing and
choice with youth identification practices. It is
suggested that this project also has implications
for the ways in which one understands and works
for inclusion.
• Introduction - current policy and context
(500 words)
• Almost as is
• Description of the site of study ( 500
words)
• Account of methodology - trigger
photographs located in the visual research
literatures (1000 words)
• Report of major findings - description of
thematised findings moving to analysis
(2,000 words)
• Theorisation of inclusion, reference to
broader literatures on school sorting and
selecting ( 1,000 words)
• Argument about the significance of the
findings, viz. disjuncture with prevailing
policy approach
• Elaboration of some implications for
research and practice ( 1500 words)
Revisit
your
writing
plan and
add word
budgets

40. now
• Take each abstract sentence and section with word count and add key
bullet points
• OR

41. Your poster
• Title
• What is already known
about this topic
• What this study adds
• THE TAKE HOME POINT

42. PLUS
Additional moves
from your abstract
colinpurrington.com

43. WHAT IS ALREADY
KNOWN ABOUT THE
TOPIC
YOUR
CONTRIBUTION
TAKE HOME
POINT
KEY RESULTS
YOUR NAME
METHODS
Literature/THEORY
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Doing so crowds the title and visually
distracts from important graphics. Put
logo on your business card, not poster.
DO. NOT.
PUT.
LOGOS.
HERE.
DO NOT PUT LOGOS here, either.

44. patricia.thomson@nottingham.ac.uk
Patthomson.net
This workshop based on
Writing for peer reviewed
journals: Strategies for getting
published. Thomson and
Kamler 2012