Meeting Journal Aims and Scope

Hi everyone, this is the first post of what I hope will become a regular blog aimed at assisting you with getting published, becoming a reviewer/associate editor/editor, or applying for these positions with the IAFOR Journal of Education. The topics of the blog posts will also be applicable, in the main, to other journals.

This first post looks at meeting journal aims and scope. We now have six different issues that make up the IAFOR Journal of Education: Technology in Education; Undergraduate Education; Studies in Education; Inclusive Education; Language Learning in Education; and Education and the Liberal Arts. Each of these issues is very different in focus.

Meeting Journal Aims and Scope

Different journals, and sometimes journal issues, have very different aims and scope, even within the field of education. Sometimes the title of a journal will give you a clue to the very specific scope of the journal as in the Journal of Educational Psychology or the Australian Mathematics Education Journal. These two journals clearly have different foci. Papers that you submit should fit the specific journal or journal issue.

A "scattergun" approach (where you submit anywhere in the hope of being published) is not sound practice. Like in darts, your article needs to hit the journal’s "bullseye": it needs to fit within the journal’s interest area. For example, a submission that is about building bridges, will not be acceptable in a journal dedicated to education. More importantly, a paper about how to teach differential calculus will not fit the scope of a journal issue dedicated to technology in education. However, within the IAFOR Journal of Education, the Studies in Education issue would be an issue that would accept this topic providing the paper met all other publication criteria (more on those in later blogs). Each issue of the IAFOR Journal of Education has its own aims and scope and these can be found in the tabs on this page: https://iafor.org/journal/iafor-journal-of-education/about/.

To raise your chances of moving to the next step with the IAFOR Journal of Education:

  1. Ensure that your paper is clearly about education.
  2. Be sure that your paper fits the scope of the particular issue.

At the IAFOR Journal of Education, we only have submissions open for one issue at a time. You need to wait until the appropriate issue is open for submissions, not submit out of scope and hope that it will be let through.

Next blog post will be about plagiarism.

Yvonne

Dr Yvonne Masters
Editor-in-Chief
IAFOR Journal of Education

Posted by Publications