Academic publishing for dummies?

July 13, 2023 4:13 PM

Can you give me a broad strokes sense of what's involved in writing a research paper (on ancient Egypt) and getting it reviewed/published? I have an art school diploma but no other academic training. I've made online connections with a few people in the field but wouldn't feel comfortable taking up their time with a lot of very basic questions.

I've been making replicas of Egyptian furniture (my MF profile has couple projects with links) and feel that I could add something valuable to the body of knowledge out there. I was surprised to find that the previous work that's been done is very sparse, incomplete and (more than just sometimes) incorrect.

I've been able to study a couple pieces up close, learned a ton from those instances and it's got me wondering what I could do to win access to more objects. I've got a personal blog and a published magazine article but it feels like the next step is a proper in-depth study/description of the pieces. I think my skills as an animation story artist and woodworker will give me the ability to convey the build processes better and in much more detail than the standard line and stipple orthographic views that I've seen in previous works.

I've got something to offer but would like to put it out there in a way that will further the study/work I’m doing.

posted by brachiopod to Education (17 answers total)

Best answer: Generally, academic publications are about publishing original research that is new. So, archeologists will describe what they've found on a recent dig. Or sometimes what's new isn't the sources, it's the interpretation of the sources by the scholar that's new.

So the question you need to answer is, what new insights about the past can be gained through your replicas? Is creating replicas a method of historical inquiry, and if so, what does it tell us?

People have written about this on other time periods/places. For example, see this example of an academic article written by a professor reflecting on a course he taught where students tried to reconstruct medieval buildings, and what they learned from the experience.

You might also want to visit your local university library and see if they have copies of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - see what gets published in it, and if you might be able to fit a piece into it.

But a fair warning - there is a lot of gatekeeping in academia, and some journal editors will be less than receptive to submissions from someone who isn't affiliated with a university and is without a PhD. You might also contact any Egyptologists and see if they'd be up for a collaboration of sorts, where you lend your animation/woodworking skills to their academic credentials/skills. I'd expect most to turn you down/not respond, but I'd imagine some would be excited at the idea.
posted by coffeecat at 4:37 PM on July 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: To not abuse edit button:

I realize I didn't include the basic steps of academic publishing:

1. Identify relevant journals where your research would be a good fit.

2. Go to those journals websites, where they will explain the rules/requirements around submissions. Some are invite only, others have guidelines for submissions. Read and follow their directions.

3. Submit.

4. Wait. Often the journal's editor will do a quick look over every submission to determine whether it's worthy of peer review. If the journal editor rejects it outright rather than sending it off to peer review, they may or may not tell you why.

5. If you get referred to peer review, it will take months, sometimes many months, to get two readers reports back. They will generally either grade it as publishable with minor revisions, revise and resubmit with considerable revisions, or not publishable. Sometimes a third reviewer will be enlisted to break a tie.
posted by coffeecat at 4:44 PM on July 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Librarians think broadly of three kinds of publications, based on audience: popular (newspapers, magazines, etc); professional (for people who work in a specific field); and academic (for folks who research in that field). For professional versus academic, think of the difference between an article for nurses summarizing best practices in patient care versus a research journal article that looks at patient outcomes with different nursing ratios.

I am wondering if a professional audience, which is to say, folks working in archaeology, might be a better target for you. For example, The Archaeologist is a magazine for professionals. They have information on submitting articles.

Academic journals will generally also have submissions guidelines, focusing on submitting research. Here are guidelines (with lots of directions) for the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, an academic journal. You can get a sense of what they are looking for there.
posted by bluedaisy at 4:49 PM on July 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I wonder if you might be able to set up a collaboration with a museum to develop something that they could use as an exhibit which could give access to pieces that you want to study and allow you to use your skills to communicate first with the general public and then perhaps to collaborate with the museum staff to write up something for a professional or academic publication?
posted by metahawk at 5:18 PM on July 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: I want to step in and say thanks for the excellent answers so far. Exactly what I was hoping for.
posted by brachiopod at 5:36 PM on July 13, 2023

Best answer: I've only ever published from inside academia, but one model to look at is "Clickspring Chris" Budiselic's collaborative work on the Antikythera Mechanism. As I understand it, he's an amateur watchmaking enthusiast who decided to try and recreate the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient mechanical calculator discovered on a Greek shipwreck, using tools and techniques that might have been available to the original maker(s), based on relatively newly-captured CT scans of the remains. In the process of doing the work, he made some interpretations of the remains that challenge accepted wisdom about the Egyptian calendar, connected with other research collaborators, and ended up publishing several papers on his interpretations. I'm not completely clear on how he connected with his coauthors, but I suspect winning the respect of folks already in the academic world and willing to coauthor may have opened some doors for him.
posted by Alterscape at 6:23 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I don't know anything about this, but maybe you want to look into the career of the hairdresser who busted myths about ancient Egyptian hairdressing techniques. She started off with a hobby and now has published academic papers.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:47 PM on July 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Academic journals of Egyptology

See if your local library has access to JSTOR
, which can give you a feel for what they all want
posted by BWA at 8:08 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I have some Facebook links that describe the processes.
Link1
Link2
Link3
Link4
Link5
Link6
Link7
I hope you can access them and find them useful. Sorry that I didn't give more helpful descriptions of the links, but I'm working from my tablet with a terrible short-term memory.
posted by b33j at 8:24 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: coffeecat's answers are incredibly thorough, detailed, and accurate. I can't even imagine a better answer to your question, honestly.
posted by Dr. Wu at 10:40 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Based on my wife's research on obscure Anglican clergymen, I'd note that reference librarians can be very helpful, and the more focused their collection, the more helpful they are likely to be. And the more focused your inquiry, the more they will be interested.

So if you locate a small college with an especially good antiquities collection and ask if they have any info on the paints used on funeral objects in the reign of [whoever], you may well be in luck.
posted by SemiSalt at 10:11 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: SASA, the Save Ancient Studies Alliance, is a great resource. It's a group of people passionate about making ancient studies (including egyptology) more accessible to non-traditional scholars. They have a regular "Let's Get Published" online meeting where you can practice presenting your work and get helpful feedback.
posted by dum spiro spero at 7:23 PM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: A few thoughts:

- The easiest way to break in to something like this would be to work with established researchers who are already publishing. Maybe they have established lines of research or research questions and you can help them address specific aspects of those research questions, or answer specific questions about various details, through your techniques. Then your contribution and co-authorship are built right into the research projects.

Don't think that you are "bothering" them. Rather, thinks of ways that you can be helpful to what they are doing - and ways the projects you work on with them can be mutually beneficial.

- Thinking small in this way is a lot easier than thinking big. E.g. it would be a lot easier to work with an existing group of researchers and publish one specific insight into one specific technique used to build one specific item than to publish your own, single-author complete summary of how to build 50 different kinds of furniture.

- This is sometimes called "experimental archaeology". I often see the term "replicative" and similar. You might be able to find other similar terms used and search existing literature on those terms can give you a lot of insight - and also ideas about which journals might be more interested in this type of research. Here are some links to experimental archaeology papers in an area I happen to be slightly familiar with: 1 2 3 4 5 (full book?)

Similar to the situation you mentioned, the experimental archaeology papers in this area are often viewed by people who actually work in the area (ie, actually building and using these stone-age weapons today) as pretty weak and even misleading. There have been huge misunderstandings about the usage and capabilities of ancient weapons etc propagated because researchers were only superficially familiar with the weapons and only experimented with them for a short time - enough to perhaps reach the abilities of an early novice, whereas ancient users honed their skills with building and using the weapons over decades and were highly proficient.

That doesn't stop weak academic papers from being published, or help highly proficient non-academics to publish better papers, however. That's just a thing that is kind of built into the system. Often the cycle is broken only when a highly proficient user is able to also gain the necessary academic credentials. (And FYI sometimes those people go down crazy wrong paths, too. The fact that you have proficiency in using or making a certain thing does not also automatically grant you the capability to understand or accurately portray the underlying theoretical concepts. There is a famous example of this in this area - I won't go into the details. But it took a few decades before the bunkum was even mostly sorted out correctly, and it still is not 100% sorted out even to this day.)

- It may be far easier to present a conference session, or portion of a roundtable session (several presenters), or presentation with your research colleagues (as outlined above) at some kind of conference or meeting, or (perhaps easiest of all) a poster session at a conference. These can be both easier to arrange and also serve as a stepping stone to meet other researchers, editors, etc etc who might be interested in working with you on the next step. In general it is far easier to be accepted for a conference presentation (and a poster session yet easier than that) than to have a published article accepted.
posted by flug at 8:33 PM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: This has been super helpful - best answers all around. Thanks to everyone for the time and thought put into their responses. I’ll leave this unresolved for a while longer but I already have a much clearer idea of where to take this project.
posted by brachiopod at 10:50 PM on July 14, 2023

Best answer: Nthing finding someone to collaborate. Writing an academic article for a specific discipline takes years of training/socialization/conditioning/indoctrination. If I were to write a paper for an adjacent but very similar field, the paper would have to be rewritten if it was originally from my field.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:09 PM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Resolved but want to shout out dum spiro spero for the SASA recommendation.

SASA had a bunch of free presentations over Sunday and today (on YT and various) with one group presentation discussing different aspects of accessibility - including people doing independent study. They touched briefly on the snake's den that publishing can be - with some journals operating as only a vanity press. It was wonderfully eye-opening.
posted by brachiopod at 8:12 PM on July 24, 2023

Response by poster: I’ll follow up to say again how thankful I am for these answers.

I decided to shift my efforts into cultivate relationships with people in the field and it's paid off in really satisfying ways. I've met some really engaged, passionate people, visited the study rooms of several European museums and examined enough pieces of furniture to keep me busy for several years. I'm also been commissioned to build a replica/restoration for a major museum show. I’ll post it as a project when it goes on display.
posted by brachiopod at 4:11 PM on March 18