What Academic Publishing Involves and How to Get Started

Academic publishing is the process of submitting your research to a journal (or book publisher), having it reviewed by peers, and—if accepted—seeing it appear as a citable publication. It matters because publications are the main currency of an academic career: they establish your track record, support promotion and funding applications, and let your work reach other researchers. If you are an early career academic, the practical starting point is to treat publishing as a multi-stage process with a high rejection rate built in, and to learn both the mechanics and the emotional side before you submit your first paper.

What academic publishing actually involves

At its core, academic publishing is a quality-control and dissemination system. You produce a manuscript, a journal assesses it (usually through peer review), and the accepted version becomes part of the permanent scholarly record. The published paper is then something others can cite, which is how research impact accumulates over time.

For an individual academic, this means publishing serves several connected purposes:

• Building a track record — a visible record of peer-reviewed output that others can evaluate.
• Creating research impact — work that is read, used, and cited by others.
• Supporting career progression — publications feed into promotion applications and research evaluation.
• Joining a scholarly conversation — situating your work within an existing body of research.

Anne-Wil Harzing's site frames this broadly: it hosts academic career guides and white papers alongside resources on research impact, research diffusion, and promotion applications, and its blog covers academic publishing, creating research impact, doing (international) research, and academic etiquette. That range is a useful signal that publishing is not a single skill but a cluster of them.

The main stages, from submission to acceptance

The exact workflow varies by field and journal, but the typical sequence looks like this:

1. Choose a target venue. Match your paper's topic, scope, and level to a journal. The Journal Quality List hosted on Harzing.com is one resource for comparing journals.
2. Prepare and format the manuscript. Follow the journal's author guidelines precisely; formatting errors are an avoidable reason for desk rejection.
3. Submit. The paper enters editorial screening, where an editor decides whether to send it out for review.
4. Peer review. Reviewers assess originality, method, and contribution, and recommend accept, revise, or reject.
5. Revise and resubmit. Most accepted papers go through at least one round of revision. Respond to reviewers point by point.
6. Acceptance and production. The paper is copy-edited, typeset, and published; you may review proofs.
7. Publication and beyond. The paper becomes citable, and you can work on making it visible and tracking its citations.

Each stage is a gate. A paper can exit the process at screening or after review, and that is normal rather than exceptional.

Why rejection is common—and how to handle it

One of the most useful things to internalize early is that rejection is the norm, not the exception. Harzing's blog post Your first publication – A roller-coaster ride with lots of ups and downs walks step by step through the emotional journey of getting a first publication published and explains why rejections are often the norm rather than the exception.

Practically, that means:

• Expect multiple submissions. A paper that is rejected by one journal is usually not a failed paper; it is a paper aimed at the wrong venue or needing revision.
• Separate the decision from your worth. Reviewers judge a manuscript, not your potential as a researcher.
• Mine the reviews. Even a rejection often contains specific, actionable feedback you can use in the next submission.
• Keep moving. Revise and resubmit rather than shelving the paper.

Harzing's own account of her career—My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals—describes eight significant failures and how each had unexpected upsides. The lesson for early career researchers is that setbacks in publishing are a normal part of a long career, not a signal to stop.

Presenting your publication and citation record

Once you have publications, how you present them matters for promotion, funding, and job applications. Citation counts and metrics are easy to misread, so the goal is to tell an accurate, well-framed story rather than to dump raw numbers.

Harzing's post Finding the pearls in your citation record shows how to use the Publish or Perish software to present your citation record to its best advantage: find the pearls in your record, polish them, and string them into a "beautiful necklace" that presents your citation story effectively. The underlying method is worth copying even if you use different tools:

• Identify your strongest, most-cited, or most relevant outputs.
• Check that citation data is accurate and attributed correctly.
• Group and frame them so a reader can see the shape of your contribution.
• Present the narrative, not just the metric.

Publish or Perish is the citation-analysis software hosted on the site, so it is a concrete tool you can use for this step.

Where early career academics should start

If you are new to publishing, the site points to a clear entry route: the Working in academia page is described as the best starting point for early career academics. It acts as a container page for all the site's resources related to working in academia—books, blog posts, videos, software, and more.

From there, the most relevant resources for publishing specifically are:

The Crafting your career in academia series is explicitly described as career guides for various aspects of an academic career, including journal publishing—so it is the most direct match if your question is "how do I publish."

A realistic way to get started

If you are about to publish for the first time, a workable plan is:

1. Read the Working in academia page to orient yourself across the resources.
2. Work through the journal publishing guide in the Crafting your career in academia series.
3. Use the Journal Quality List to shortlist target journals.
4. Submit, and treat the first decision—whatever it is—as data rather than a verdict.
5. When you have outputs, use Publish or Perish to build a clear citation narrative.

The through-line in all of this is that academic publishing rewards persistence and framing as much as it rewards the underlying research. The resources above are built around that reality, and they are aimed specifically at people at the start of an academic career.