Publishing in health communication journals

Teresa L. Thompson, Ph.D.

As many of the readers of this short essay are likely to be young scholars attempting to establish their careers, my focus will be to share with you some thoughts about how to be successful in the publication part of this effort. I am the long-time (32 years!) editor of the journal Health Communication (HC) and have observed what is successful and what is not so successful as you attempt to publish in health communication journals. I cannot claim that my suggestions will be applicable to all health communication journals, but I suspect that many of them will be relevant to at least most such journals.

Publishing in journals is only a part of a successful academic career, but it is a very important and difficult part of doing well in academia. Most of you will also be successful as teachers and will serve your field and institutions with enthusiasm. More scholars, I believe, struggle to publish than they do to teach and to provide service. For most of you, publication will eventually include books, monographs, and book chapters. The key to the success of most notable scholars, however, begins with publication in peer-reviewed, academic journals. Contracts for books and invitations to write book chapters typically follow the establishment of one’s reputation through publication in journals unless one is invited by a senior scholar to coauthor a book or book chapter.

Dr. Kreps has already thoroughly outlined the field and importance of health communication, so I will build on the valuable perspective he has provided for us. Additionally, some of my former senior editors for HC and I have already published a “nuts and bolts of publishing in Health Communication” piece [1] in the 100th issue of the journal, so I refer readers to this for itemization of the steps involved in submitting to journals if the process is new to them. Publishing in such outlets as HC and The Journal of Health Communication is highly competitive, so care is necessary in the preparation of work for submittal and movement through the review process. HC typically has an acceptance rate of 13.5% and received almost 750 submittals during 2019. We publish 14 issues a year.

I think it is obvious and safe to assert that a key to successful publication is doing good research. One must follow all the guidelines for conducting research that one was taught in graduate school. I would encourage you to focus your research efforts on what one might call “do-able”, straightforward research efforts during the early part of your career, saving more complex qualitative work for a point in time where you are more established or tenured (if this is relevant at your institution). It is also useful to think about publication outlets before you actually conduct a study or begin writing a piece of scholarship. Different journals have different criteria on which they will evaluate your work, and it is important to anticipate and think about those criteria ahead of time. If you are submitting to HC, for instance, you should make sure that your research is based on a theoretical framework rather than on just a health problem. Grounding research in a theoretical framework extends the generalizability of the work beyond the health issue that was the focus of a particular study, such as diabetes, and allows us to learn more about the process of communication as it relates to health and health care delivery more broadly. This notion relates to the fact that research submitted to a health communication journal must simultaneously focus upon health or health care delivery concerns and an examination of communication processes. Not a week goes by that I don’t receive several submissions that focus on a health issue but not on communication processes in a sophisticated manner. Such authors seem to think that by writing an article on a health issue they are communicating about it in a manner that would be appropriate for a health communication journal. They are not, however, studying communication processes. Similarly, I rejected a piece just last week that looked at whether doctors sit or stand while speaking to a patient in a hospital bed. That is not a sophisticated, theoretically based communicative process. It’s a simplistic issue that should be part of a much more detailed conceptualization of what communication is and how it works. The field of communication moved beyond such simple studies three or four decades ago.

If the authors of the type of submissions I just described had carefully read the journal, I think that these concerns would have been obvious to them. Please, do not ever submit to a journal without spending quite of bit of time looking at the work that the journal has published in recent years and modeling your work after that. If one looked only at the work that was published in the early issues of HC, one would see less theoretically grounded and sophisticated work than one would see now. But I began accepting submissions for the journal in 1987. It is fortunate that work has developed considerably since that time. Additionally, please do not ever submit a piece to a journal that is not in the format required by the journal. When I receive a piece in AMA rather than APA, the format we have used for over 30 years, it is obvious that the authors did not conduct the research and prepare the submission with HC in mind. That does not necessarily mean that it is not a good piece of research in some ways, but it’s very rare that such a piece meets the criteria of the journal and my reviewers in other ways.

Ten years ago I asked two colleagues to study the reasons for the rejection of those pieces that we had rejected between the time that the web-based submission system went into effect and our 100th issue [2]. They identified the following factors:

• 1)Concerns about writing. Some pieces were poorly written, presented a lack of full information for replicability, were difficult to understand, did not present the logic of decisions, and included grammatical and APA errors.
• 2)An inadequate/dated literature review and/or theoretical framework. Please remember that the literature review should build an argument for your study.
• 3)Methodological, measurement, and statistical analysis problems. You should always provide the rationale for such decisions and provide adequate detail about them.
• 4)A discussion section that does not make a new contribution. The discussion should bring your findings to life.
• 5)A lack of focus on communicative processes. This is the most consistent problem in submissions received by HC.

It’s important to note, however, that this analysis indicated that there was never just one reason for the rejection of an article. There were always multiple problems with pieces that were rejected. The exception for this would be the lack of focus on communicative processes. A piece can be good in every other way, but if it does examine health communication processes it will not be accepted for publication by our journal. A piece that does not focus on health communication will be desk-rejected by me or one of my senior editors and will not even be sent out for review. And please note that public health and medical journals have a very different perspective on this than do health communication journals. You will want to adapt accordingly.

Earlier I noted the need to read the journal to which you are submitting. You will want to cite research that has been published in that journal in the past. Let me add to that guideline the suggestion to carefully read all the information that is available in the websites for the journal and the publisher. If authors use only the Word template for my journal and not the “Instructions to Authors” and the “Sample Citations” they are likely to make errors that will damage their credibility in the eyes of reviewers. You also do not want to make the piece any longer than is absolutely necessary and you don’t want to include a voluminous number of tables and figures. They take up valuable journal space. Your odds of acceptance are lower if the piece is unusually long. If your work is qualitative and requires more pages or words than are allowed by the journal, contact the editor prior to submission to ascertain his or her openness to this. And do not be afraid to contact editors ahead of time to solicit feedback about the appropriateness of a piece for submission to a journal. I may take a bit of time to respond, but I think I always do respond. Some editors will refer you to an editorial assistant, but they will only do so if that assistant has the expertise to make relevant judgments. It will also be useful for you to establish liaisons with others working in the area, both through interactions at conferences and through email or social media exchange.

If you are attempting to submit to a journal that publishes in English and English is not your first language, it may well be useful for you to seek professional editorial assistance. Some professional editors will also provide useful input about APA format, but most do not. And no reference software currently gets APA right. You will have to make sure that YOU learn APA7 and go through the references yourself to avoid errors. Do make sure that your work fits within the word or page limits of the journal. For HC, for instance, articles should be 25 pp. (text only). This equates to approximately 5000 words.

You should be aware that it is almost always necessary to revise a piece, sometimes repeatedly, before it is likely to be accepted to most health communication journals. Make sure that you thoroughly, completely, and seriously address all the concerns of the reviewers. Did I make that point strongly enough? Be very careful about trying to rationalize away reviewer concerns; reviewers are not likely to respond positively to this. The letter describing the how you have addressed the concerns of the reviewers is just as important as the revisions themselves. It should be specific, including each of the comments of the reviewer and how you have responded to it, and should be written nondefensively and politely. The “response to reviewers” is not a part of a cover letter for revisions. It is uploaded into the separate slot so labeled. Reviewers do not have access to the cover letter, as the cover letter typically contains author identification.

Related to this, your discussion of limitations of your research should NOT acknowledge the limitations and then argue that they are not really limitations. Every study has limitations. Just acknowledge those that are relevant to your research and live with it.

I’m also assuming it is obvious to the audience reading this essay that methodological and statistical decisions should be carefully made and explained. Methodological/statistical sophistication is not as important as is the appropriateness of the statistical tests. I just this week had to explain to an author why an ANOVA should not be conducted on nominal level data. The data were unusually constructed, but a careful examination indicated that they were, in fact, not proper ordinal level data. Don’t put yourself in that position!

A few other common mistakes come to mind that I’m sure you would like to avoid. Make sure that the piece is completely anonymous when it is submitted. Make sure that you approve the PDF when you submit a piece and, subsequently, revisions. I’ve had authors wait for months to hear from me about a submission that I never received. The author had not approved the submission, so it did not come to me. And always have someone else, preferably several others, proof your work prior to submitting or resubmitting.

Overall, most health communication journals publish work that is focused on both health/health care delivery and communicative processes, is theoretically grounded and methodologically appropriate, is well-written, and makes a new contribution to the research. You will want to make evident YOUR new contribution in the article itself – do not assume that it will be apparent to readers and reviewers. Good luck with your work!