Publishing Quality Content

How to Attract and Publish High Quality Content

Below are some ideas on encouraging submissions to your journal which you may like to discuss with your Sage editor.

• Make use of your Editorial Board: Editorial board members should be encouraged to contribute articles to the journal, either by submitting their own work (subject to rigorous peer-review) or soliciting articles from their colleagues. See our guide on Making the Most of Your Editorial Board. Marketing tools, such as journal business cards and flyers, may be provided if needed.

• Appoint a Reviews Editor: Review papers often attract more citations than regular articles. If appropriate, consider appointing a dedicated Reviews Editor to solicit review articles for the journal.

• Special Issues: Special issues on hot topics can attract new authors and readers and are an opportunity to invite prominent scholars in the field to guest edit. We give some guidance on publishing special issues here.

• Conferences: Events and Conferences can generate ideas for articles and provide networking opportunities in order to expand your base of reviewers and contributors. Consider running a writing workshop at a suitable conference, or arranging a ‘meet the editor’ session. These can be good ways of introducing yourself and your journal to a new audience or to young scholars.

  Please note that we cannot accept material that has already been published; any article submitted to the journal should be substantially different from the version published in the conference proceedings. For more information on our publication policy, please visit our Publishing Policies page.

• Providing excellent author services: If the author of a submitted paper has a positive experience then they are much more likely to submit again in the journal, even if their paper is rejected. Timely responses to enquiries, quick review decisions and constructive feedback from reviewers can all contribute to a positive experience.

  You might like to let authors know if their article has been highly downloaded or cited and encourage them to submit other articles to the journal. Individual article downloads and Altmetric scores are listed online. Your Sage Editor can provide additional article download and citation data.

• Is your Aims and Scope up to date? Review your Aims and Scope regularly to ensure that it accurately reflects what is currently being published in the journal. Ensure that your instructions to authors or submission guidelines are clear and unambiguous. Also consider publishing your peer review policy on your journal website, if you do not already do so. This reassures potential authors that the journal employs a high degree of quality control.
   
• Encourage authors to use ORCID: ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized. Sage is a supporting member of ORCID and encourage all authors and co-authors to link their ORCIDs to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. We collect ORCID iDs during the manuscript submission process and an author’s ORCID iD then becomes part of their accepted publication’s metadata, making their work attributable to them and only them. The author’s ORCID iD is published with their article so that fellow researchers reading their work can link to their ORCID profile and from there link to their other publications. Visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.