In this blog, Ben Gray describes the pathway of getting your article or blog published in a journal or magazine. Ben has numerous journal and magazine article publications (nine in 2024), has written a book (‘Face to Face with Emotions in Health and Social Care’) and has also published 12 poems. He is a Research Ambassador at Healthwatch Essex and a Peer Support Worker at Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust. He has personal experience of schizophrenia and an autistic spectrum condition.
Step 1. Begin with a Title.
Once the qualitative data are gathered and themes generated by the researchers a good place to start in the writing up process is with a title. The authors should immerse themselves in the data, themes and reflect on their own place in the research process. This will help to summarise the research in an easy-to-understand title and guide the reader in what follows the title: the text. It is important to make the title as short as possible, an accurate portrayal of findings and it helps if it is ‘snappy’. The title of the article/ blog will likely change over the course of the writing process, so you might revisit the title you have generated at the end of the writing process too. For example, I recently wrote an article for The Psychologist whose initial title was: ‘Hearing Voices Sessions in Peer Support: A Service User’s and Voice Hearer’s Account’ which after three drafts became: ‘Hearing Voices- What Helps?’.
Step 2. Identify a Target Publication.
It is useful to target journals who have a large publication portfolio. In other words, journals and magazines who publish more often during the year. The higher the status of the journal the more articles it will reject. It is good to know your journal, either by being a reader of it or just quickly looking at its aims and scope, which describe the journal’s publication strategy and areas of interest which might fit your article.
Step 3. Pool your Resources.
The more authors that are involved in the development of your article, the more iterations/ drafts will probably be necessary. It is important to get everyone’s views across and pool your resources as each author will have an interest, topic or specialism that they can bring to the article. Nowadays, it is important to get a lived experience perspective across by having an author who has an interest or lived experience of a condition, in my case schizophrenia/ mental illness and autism, or for others perhaps women’s or ethnic minorities experiences of health or social care. As highlighted by Mental Health Research Matters, ‘by listening to and learning from people with relevant lived experiences, you’re more likely to create useful mental health research that makes a difference’.
Step 4. Science Vs Experience.
At the present time, there is often a binary of science/research vs. lived experience in published journal articles. Articles are typically a scientific or research paper or a first-person account/lived experience narrative about something (such as my experiences of mental illness). This is gradually changing though, and in my opinion, the best and most interesting articles combine both research and lived experience. It is important to note that research articles are more difficult to publish than lived experience narrative/ first person accounts or blogs, which are highly sought after. The reason behind this is simple. Journals receive many research articles but few first person/ lived experience stories. Also, all research articles are peer reviewed and will almost inevitably require edits suggested by academic reviewers. Lived experience accounts are more sought after because they are rarer and of general interest. They are often accepted or declined by the editor of the journal rather than going to peer review.
This is a win win if you are someone with lived experience that you want to share with others and have a story to tell. It is also good because, in mine and other people’s cases, a disability becomes an ability and an issue that people want to read and know about. It is good to relate your lived experience to a particular research topic. I have mental illness, for example, and have related this to my work in peer support, emergency alarm systems on mental health wards creating fear and anxiety, and running ‘hearing voices sessions’ with service users/ voice hearers.
Step 5. Add Other People’s Research or Stories to Your Article.
It is most important to include other people’s research or lived experience narratives/stories into your article. This will make it stronger, more considered and show that your article or blog is not just one person’s or team’s perspective. For academic or research articles, this can be done as a systematic review or via the expertise of academic contributors who have accrued specialist knowledge on the subject area or topic. For first person accounts or lived experience articles, you may not need to cite other publications but sometimes they ask you to do so. An easy way of doing a literature search is just to enter a key word(s) into an online search engine such a Google (for example, keywords of: mental illness and peer support). You then review the results, especially looking for prestigious publications and organisations (for example: Rethink, the Department of Health, the Journal of Mental Health, British Journal of Social Work). You then read the articles in the Google results and pay special attention to the articles that they have cited in their references. You can then go on to read these publications and cite them in your article. Always fill out your article with other people’s articles to support or contradict your findings or point of view. This will give your article both scope and diversity.
Step 6. Format and Word Count.
Perhaps the most annoying thing in the publication process is that you often have to adhere to the journal’s format and word limit. They are often very strict on this and formatting requirements vary across different journals. Usually the format is quite simple and looks something like this:
- Abstract;
- Keywords;
- Introduction;
- Methods;
- Findings or Results;
- Discussion or Conclusion;
- References
With first person accounts they are less strict and procrustean as they have fewer of these submitted and they are considered less ‘scientific’ and more of ‘general interest’, as described in step 4. Often, if you do not format your article to the journal’s in-house style or if you go over the word limit, they will return it back to you without reading it and say you need to follow their guidelines. This is a pain but, in my experience, it does make your article the better for it. When writing a magazine articles or blogs, I usually organise them by topic using subheadings. For instance, in my article on my experience running hearing voices sessions in The Psychologist it follows a sequence of: ‘what happens in a support session’, ‘nurture feelings of safety’, ‘stay curious’, ‘ask someone what they need’, ‘really hear and connect with someone’s pain’, ‘working together to understand someone’s trauma’, ‘be reassuring’ and ‘inspiring hope’.
Step. 7. Finish with a Title.
As I previously mentioned, you may want to revisit the title of your article at the end of the writing process. You could ask yourself if the title is too generic, or if it lacks verve. In Step 1. I highlighted how I adjusted the title of my recent article from ‘Hearing Voices Sessions in Peer Support: A Voice Hearer’s Account’ which later became: ‘Hearing Voices- What Helps?’. After reviewing the literature and going through several drafts, you will probably come up with a better title than you did at first.
Additional Tips
- Always keep a pen and paper handy to jot down fresh ideas. Then after you have written a page or so of notes insert them into the main document. Then leave for a day or so and come back to them later to give structure to the notes that you have inserted. In other words, arrange the sentences of your notes into ordered paragraphs that follow logically and argumentatively.
- It is important to be aware and wary of scams. When you have published your article or blog you may get spam emails from what I call ‘ghost and vanity journals’. Their aim is not to publish your work but to con you out of your money. A ghost journal or site is one that appears online, pretending to publish papers and which charge for publishing them, but they will never actually get round to publishing your article. A vanity journal will often be a spam email that mentions a previous work of yours (e.g. ‘Hearing Voices- What Helps’), saying how good it was and asking if you would like to publish with them. A good way to spot a vanity journal, who charge for all articles, is that your article has nothing to do with their subject or topic. For instance, I had an email from a journal of complimentary and Chinese medicines, but I could tell it was ‘fake’ because it mentioned an article I wrote on hearing voices, which has nothing to do with the journal’s scope and content. A usual way to spot these journals are ‘fake’ is that the language in the email will be very bad. For instance, an amusing one said: ‘Felicitations from our most excellent journal’. You can find more information on how to spot fraudulent publishers at Think.Check.Submit.
- Another dilemma is that sometimes journals are open access, meaning that the content of your article is available to all on the web. This is exorbitantly charged at over £1000, but your organisation might pay for it if is a major journal. If you do study or work at a university, their library service will usually provide information on open access publishing. You can find the University of Essex Library and Cultural Service’s open access support here. Sometimes open access journals have waivers for lived experience/ first person stories, such as Schizophrenia Bulletin where I have published about 4 papers, so you end up paying nothing. Most journals are paid by subscribers/readers so they do not charge a penny.
- As for deciding on the order of authors for articles with more than one author, journals usually have a guide on who should be included. Authors are included if they had the idea, drafted the research protocol, applied for funding, conducted data collection and then analysis. The first author should be the lead contributor in these activities along with the writing up process. There is also often a hierarchy, in so far as the lead author will often be a Professor and other authors more junior to them, such as Research Officers. This is a standard practice but it does raise the issue of stealing someone’s thunder and even plagiarism. It is valuable to have an open conversation with your fellow authors if you can about what order your names will be included. Some co-authors simply list their names alphabetically to avoid some of these issues.
- Finally, it is important to note that journal articles, magazine articles, books and blogs will have differences and are often written and formatted in a varied way. Journal articles and books often have references. Magazines and blogs may do, but more often do not. Journal articles typically have the set structure of ‘abstract’, ‘key words’, introduction’, ‘findings’, ‘discussion’, ‘references’. Magazines and blogs, however, are often organised by topic or titled with the content that follows in the article, as described at the end of Step 6. Journal articles, magazine articles and blogs are usually sent in full by email or online on the journal’s submission website. With books, the usual process is to mail a cover letter, short summary of the book outlining the content of chapters and two or so of these chapters. Larger publishing markets are a good idea. For instance, my book is published by Springer, New York, whose USA population has a bigger market of more readers and buyers. You will also get royalties. I was paid $1200 for my book. Most journal articles are unpaid as are blogs. Magazine articles are often not paid but sometimes they are. For example, I was paid £300 by the Nursing Times for a magazine article on the emotional labour of nursing.
I hope that this blog has aided or encouraged you to be an author, particularly if you have lived experience of a health condition, trauma, inequality, misogyny such as domestic violence or coercion in a relationship, homophobia, transphobia or racism. You have a story to tell!
Ben Gray, Research Ambassador