15 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality PARt I: wHAt to PUBlIsH And wHeRe to PUBlIsH It they’re publishing and if they might have any helpful advice. If you’ve published your work in a journal before, your chances of being published by the same journal are good – certainly the editor will attend carefully to your new paper – but that alone is not reason enough to send your work to that journal. Only if your new article suits the journal’s publishing agenda as well as the one already published in it did (or if you’ve been lucky enough to receive an open invitation to submit future work) should you submit to the same journal. As much care should be taken over a good publishing relationship as over a good academic or scientific paper, and a good publishing relationship is fostered by sending top quality work that fits. It can sometimes be helpful to contact a journal before deciding to submit your paper. Not all journals will welcome such queries, however, so if the guidelines suggest that this is not wanted – that is, that only full submissions are requested – don’t pursue this approach. If, on the other hand, the journal invites queries in advance of submission or it seems that a query letter might be an effective means of first contact with a journal that simply doesn’t have the space to include all the publishable papers it receives, it can be useful to send a message outlining the point of your study and including a summary of your paper (an early draft of the abstract would serve this purpose well, but be sure to polish and perfect it before sending it along: see Section 6.2.2). If you learn from your query that the topic or methodology of your paper would make it a low priority for the journal, it doesn’t mean that you should abandon your efforts to publish your paper in that journal if that is your preference, but you will have a better understanding of the challenges you face and can then decide whether you should continue your efforts to publish in that journal or spend your time seeking an appropriate journal with which you stand a better chance of success.