Writing a journal article

Presentations at academic conferences are a good outlet for student projects. Not only are you exposed to a wide range of other research from students, faculty, and researchers in the field, but presentations are relatively easy to get accepted in comparison to journal articles. Journals are more restrictive about what they will publish, as they have limited space for articles in the issues they publish each year. However, that should not stop you from submitting! Publications are a vital aspect of preparing yourself for a career in research.

If writing a journal article sounds like a lot of work, you would be correct. I do have some good news, though. If you wrote a research proposal for your study, you have completed about 40% of your article already! Empirical journal articles, as we discussed in Chapter 3, have five sections—Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. Your research proposal covers the first two sections, the introduction and methods. While you will need to change the tense of your methods section from what you will do in your study to what you did do in your study, the majority of the content in your proposal can stay the same.

It is beyond the scope of this textbook to provide you a detailed guide to writing an academic journal article. There are number of books and guides available for help, though I haven’t found any that I would recommend over others. Wendy Belcher, author of Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, offers her worksheets for writing a journal article for free on her website. Additional guidance on writing quantitative research reports can be found on this libguide from Sacred Heart University and this open access peer-reviewed article by Maher El-Masri and Susan Fox-Wasylyshn.

For the moment, let’s focus on identifying the right journal to submit to. The first decision you will need to make is whether to submit to a journal that is specifically dedicated to students, such as the Columbia Social Work Review or the University of Houston’s Perspectives on Social Work. Submitting an article to one of these venues means you will be competing against other students. It’s possible that an article in a student journal will be more difficult to find in searches or that some researchers may be reluctant to cite work found in a student-authored journal. If, on the other hand, you want to submit your article as any other researcher would, look at journals that often publish on your topic. Perhaps you want to publish in a journal that is cited often in your references. You may want to try out JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator) to find journals that may be a good fit for your paper based on your abstract. If you publish in a commercial journal, your article will be in competition with articles from seasoned researchers, but may get more exposure.

While you will need to find a journal that publishes in your area, note as well that journals are reluctant to publish highly similar articles. Your study should add something new to the journal’s output as well as the literature more broadly. Each journal will have specific instructions on format, citation style, length, and other considerations. Be sure to attend to each and every detail. Incorrectly constructed and submitted articles are easy to reject.

As with conference presentations, if you have research collaborators, writing a journal article is often a collaborative endeavor. If you’re a fairly new doctoral student, we suggest working with a faculty mentor who can help you fine-tune your article for publication. You may also want to reach out to other scholars who publish in your topic area and ask for assistance. They may suggest additional literature you did not find or offer edits to your content to better meet the expectations of journal reviewers. Once you submit a journal article, you will either receive a rejection or a “revise and resubmit”. With the latter, the journal may accept your article if you make the suggested revisions to their satisfaction.

Anatomy of a Research Article

Below, I’m going to take you through the key elements of a quantitative research report. This overview is pretty general and conceptual, and it will be helpful for you to look at existing scholarly articles that deal with quantitative research (like ones in your literature review) to see the structure applied. Also keep in mind that different journals or dissemination channels may want the sections broken out slightly differently; nonetheless, the content outlined below should be in a research report

.===HIGHLIGHTED PORTIONS ARE FROM DECARLO ET AL & ARE GOOD, BUT NEEDED TO BE SPRINKLED INTO THE APPROPRIATE SUBHEADINGS, WILL NEED MORE INTEGRATIONS====

Introduction and literature review

The introduction and literature review should be included as part of your research report so that readers have enough information to evaluate the context for your research for themselves. The introduction and literature review in your article should be similar to the same sections from your research proposal, where you described the literature relevant to the study you wanted to do. With your results in hand, you may find that you have to add information to the literature you wrote previously to help orient the reader of the report to important topics needed to understand the results of your study.

In this section or your paper you will discuss why this particular research is of importance and needs to be studied. This often begins with a problem statement that present the social problem related to the research (i.e., the relevance of the study), the theoretical framework for the study, and a literature review that includes the specific variables used in the study’s analyses and highlights the gaps in the literature that the study aims to fill (i.e., the innovation of the study). To appropriately conduct a literature review you will research articles that pertain to your research interest and topic. While conducting a literature review you  should discover the historical roots of the research interest being pursued, theoretical frameworks, gaps in literature, and implications. The purpose of the literature review is to ensure the reader is well informed on the research being presented and can assess the applicability of your methods and the importance of your findings.

Methods

We’re going to spend some time talking about what matters in quantitative research reports, but the very first thing to understand is this: openness with your methods is key. You should never hide what you did to get to a particular conclusion and, if someone wanted to, they should be able to replicate more or less exactly what you did. While your quantitative report won’t have every single step you took to get to your conclusion, it should have plenty of detail so someone can get the picture. You should be as transparent as possible to offer concise clarity and consistency.

A helpful open source article for reporting quantitative methods and results (we’ll discuss unique features of qualitative reporting in the next chapter) is written by Norris et al. (2015).^[1] The article is about reporting from studies in which you collected your own data, but much of the information will also apply to secondary data analysis studies.

We suggest the following subsections for the Methods section of the manuscript: (1) Design, Setting, and General Procedures; (2) Population and Sampling; (3) Data Collection;  (4) Measurement; and (5) Data Analysis.

Design, Setting, and General Procedures

you should explicitly lay out your study design—for instance, if it was experimental, be specific about the type of experimental design.

IRB statement

Setting

a general description of your data, including the time period, any exclusions you made from the original data set and the source

Population and Sampling

Discuss the type of sampling that you used, if that’s applicable to your project

Data Collection

Measurement

In this section, you should also discuss how you operationalized your variables. What did you mean when you asked about educational attainment—did you ask for a grade number, or did you ask them to pick a range that you turned into a category? This is key information for readers to understand your research. Remember when you were looking for ways to operationalize your variables? Be the kind of author who provides enough information on operationalization so people can actually understand what they did.

Data Analysis

Next, talk about the specific statistical methods you used, like t-tests, Chi-square tests, or regression analyses. For descriptive statistics, you can be relatively general—you don’t need to say “I looked at means and medians,” for instance. You need to provide enough information here that someone could replicate what you did.

Results

For this section, you’re going to provide tables with descriptions of your sample, including, but not limited to, sample size, frequencies of sample characteristics like race and gender, levels of measurement, appropriate measures of central tendency, standard deviations and variances. Here you will also want to focus on the analyses you used to actually draw whatever conclusion you settled on, both descriptive and inferential (i.e., bivariate or multivariate).

The actual statistics you report depend entirely on the kind of statistical analysis you do. For instance, if you’re reporting on a logistic regression, it’s going to look different than reporting on an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). In the previous chapter, we provided links to open textbooks that detail how to conduct quantitative data analysis. You should look at these resources and consult with your research professor to help you determine what is expected in a report about the particular statistical method you used.

The important thing to remember here—as we mentioned above—is that you need to be totally transparent about your results, even and especially if they don’t support your hypothesis. There is value in a disproved hypothesis, too—you now know something about how the state of the world is not.

Discussion

In this section, you’re going to connect your statistical results back to your hypothesis and discuss whether your results support your hypothesis or not. You are also going to talk about what the results mean for the larger field of study of which your research is a part, the implications of your findings, and how your research relates to what is already out there in this field. When your research doesn’t pan out the way you expect, if you’re able to make some educated guesses as to why this might be (supported by literature if possible, but practice wisdom works too), share those as well.

Let’s take a minute to talk about what happens when your findings disprove your hypothesis or actually indicate something negative about the group you are studying. The discussion section is where you can contextualize “negative” findings. For example, say you conducted a study that indicated that a certain group is more likely to commit violent crime. Here, you have an opportunity to talk about why this might be the case outside of their membership in that group, and how membership in that group does not automatically mean someone will commit a violent crime. You can present mitigating factors, like a history of personal and community trauma. It’s extremely important to provide this relevant context so that your results are more difficult to use against a group you are studying in a way that doesn’t reflect your actual findings.

Make sure to talk about the next steps for you, other researchers, or policy-makers based on your research findings.

Limitations

In this section, you’re going to critique your own study. What are the advantages, disadvantages, and trade-offs of what you did to define and analyze your variables? Some questions you might consider include: What limits the study’s applicability to the population at large? Were there trade-offs you had to make between rigor and available data? Did the statistical analyses you used mean that you could only get certain types of results? What would have made the study more widely applicable or more useful for a certain group? You should be thinking about this throughout the analysis process so you can properly contextualize your results.

In this section, you may also consider discussing any threats to internal validity that you identified and whether you think you can generalize your research. If you used any measurement tools that haven’t been validated yet, discuss how this could have affected your results.

Significance and conclusions

The conclusion section is usually just a short paragraph that emphasizes the key points you would like to make. You want to use the conclusions section to bring it full circle for your reader—why did this research matter? Talk about how it contributed to knowledge or practice around the topic. Identify and discuss ethical implications of your findings for social workers and social work research.