 Mae dyma'r gwybod y dyma, felly mae'n ceisio'n digwydd i'w sefydliadau, o'i gwneud grefio'r ffordd a'i gwneud o gwybod a'i gwneud i'w sefydliadau, a'u gwneud o'r ffordd a'u gwneud i'w sefydliadau. Rwy'n dechrau i ddweud yma ychydig, aeth y gweithio'n gweithio'n gwybod? A'r ffordd o'n gwneud i'w ddweud? Felly, mae'n gweithio'r ffordd yn ymlaen, mae'r ffordd wedi gwneud i gwneud i'w wneud, ac ydy'r llwyaf o'r cyflawn i'r cyffredinol yn y DU. Ac ydy'r llwyaf o'r cyffredinol yn ei ddweud o'r cyffredinol. Felly, mae'r bwysig yn cyfryng, mae'r fydd ymgyrch yn cyfrif yng Nghymru, ac mae'r fydd ymgyrch yn cyfrif yn cyfrif, mae'r bwysig yn cyfrif yng nghymru, ac mae'r bwysig yn cyfrif yn cyfrif ynghylch, science review, that sort of journals. Which publish in that area. That's the type of journal I wouldn't even consider for lots of reasons. One is that they would never even consider one of my publications. Secondly, they use methods that are just not what I use. And thirdly, they are so, so competitive, that I know that I would have no chance whatsoever. ond o rhai, mae'n bod yn fawr, ac at y hiwn ymddangodd wedi bod y peth gweithio'r cyhoeddus yn fyddion am eu cynllunio, mae ychydig yn cael trafod usiannod, fod sy'n gwneud am y cyngor ac yn ni, yn yr un gan gwneud, dyna ddych chi'n gwneud o'r cyngor yn rai'r ymu'n cymdeithiol. So. Rym ni nad yna'n ysgrifennu, wrth gwrs mae'n gwneud o'r cyngor yn cymdoedd gysig, ac yn eimyl i'r cyngor arall, yn cael cyngor, i'r edrych yn yw'rophile a dyma yng Nghymru yn ymylid ac yn ymmylid ar y mae'r amser. felly y ymwneud yn amser o'r orphaniad i gyhoeddwyr o'r adref yn ymilydd yn ymwylid. Rydych yn ymwneud i'r adref yn yr edrych am yr UK sydd yn yr Otft Gŵr Eistedd, ond ynnyín ei ganchwyn i'r adref yn ymwylo i gynghoedd ac amser. Wrth gwrs na'r holl dda i ddiwyledd, wedi gwneud y lluniau nad yw'n gwneud eu gwneud mewn gyfatiad, neu gallwn eu gwneud i'n meddwl i. Mae hyn yn aeth oedd y cwyddoedd y bydd gyddoedd yn fawr e. I ran oedd y surfacebien ar y cwyddoedd, mae hyn yn ghriff i ond o'n bwysig yma, neu olygan, mae hynny'n gallu cyntaf oedd cadw'r cyfgrffwysur. Rwyf ni'n rhan o'r meddwl yn rhan o'r awdrail, rydw i'n meddwl sy'n dda wedi bod yn give rhai o ddenud oedd y peolion, rydw i'n meddwl i'r meddwl i'r gŵr cyllidol. You want to reach out as much as possible to different people. So I also look at other journals, for instance Politics and Evidence, Policy and Politics, which were published recently, and these sort of journals what it does is that it's read by people who work, in general, on policy, on political institutions, on engagement in different sorts. i'w gwneud o'r baronyll, ond nid i'n gynglwch edrych o'r ffordd i'r llunion eu haf Thun, ac yn y frechu'r rhaglen iawn, rydw i'ch ddweud a chael erleb cymdeithasol, i'r hyn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch i mi, i'n ymgyrch i mi'r rhywbeth ar gyfer gwaith, ac yna rwyf yn entynnol yn deudio at dwyr honno ychydig ar gwynyddio y diwetmon a chydweithio. A bydd ym mwyn hwnnw gallu mig, chyn fydd â'r peidiol, dwi crew'r ideaeon. That's basically how I choose to journals, and there's another one, a very good one in the UK, which is political studies, which again will publish articles in any area of politics. I think those journals are really interesting to publishing. The problem is sometimes it's a bit difficult to publish in there because they get so many submissions. And then there's the UK context, I don't know if you want me to go through that. Well, that would be interesting, yeah. Rydyn yw'r edrych yn cofynol eich hebwyluaeth, y bydddai'r gwneud yn cael ei eistedd. Gwyd yn ei eistedd yn y mewn awr iawn. Rydyn yn eistedd ar rhan 5 o 5, 8 yrwydd o'r hyn, ac y gall Gwyd yn ei wneud y cwm iawn i fynd i'n gwneud y byddai'r awr iawn. Yn y cwm iawn, os ydych yn y gён o'r dweud o ein iawn, o'r dweud o rhai gynhyrchwyr, of you published or which books you have you published, and are there of high quality or low quality. And so it evolves every single output that you nominate. So you nominate, say three to five will be read by someone in the jury and they'll make an assessment saying this is a four star, which is the highest, or this is a one star, which is the lowest. And in that assessment, one of the things is that it's sort of an assumption is that the higher impact factor of the journal and the broader the journal, the more likely it would have been difficult to publish there. And because of that, those articles published in that type of journals are more highly ranked. Almost regardless of the content, obviously it doesn't work that way. So obviously you could publish an article which is really not very good in one of those journals and then someone, a jury comes and reads it and say actually this is not that good. But just the fact you have published in the journal and that straight away the way the jury is going to read your article will be with a different position towards it. Because they'll know that to get published it will have gone through a reviewing process where say three or four people will have read that article blind and made comments on it. So it will have gone through a sort of a filtering process already. So that's a very specific context to the UK. So because of that, as academics, we're very minded to, whilst we can publish within our disciplines journals, we're also very minded to also publish in what we call high impact factor journals. Two things that sort of spring to mind there though. One would be that those high impact factor journals will have more submissions to them, it will take longer to be published in them. And secondly the cycle isn't it, there will be certain times within this five year ref cycle where people will be keen to get their work out. And it might be that those are two things that are possibly worth considering when submitting work, it's the timing and the journal. Definitely. So some of the journals with a very high impact factor, four, five, six, that sort of thing, there will have so many articles submitted that actually it's very likely if it gets through for submission it will take some time to be reviewed. But actually in some of these journals there's something like a 50 to 70% rejection at desk, what we call desk rejection. So the article is submitted, the editor looks at it and they said no this is not going to go anywhere and rejects it. So in some ways that's better because it's better that you have that decision and then you can move on to a different journal. And usually that decision happens very quickly within a week, two weeks. But if that doesn't happen then you go through the reviewing process and the reviewing process it will vary a lot from journal to journal and my advice would be for people to check on the websites. And even to email editors or editorial assistants that's absolutely fine as editors and editorial assistants used to answer those queries all the time. So asking roughly how long will it take for the reviewing process. That's not always, editors don't always control on that because the reviewing process is always dependent on reviewers. And there's actually a lot of difficulty in first of all identifying reviewers, convincing reviewers to do the review because it's a non-paid job. It's a job that people do because they want to be good citizens, good academics. And one of my roles as an editor actually, the thing that takes me the longest is to find suitable reviewers. And then when you do get the reviewers then they're doing a favor to you really. So we might give them a month to submit the review but they might take three months for perfectly good reasons. So a reviewing process for my experience these days takes about three months more or less but it could take much longer. My own last article I was submitted took forever and it was because the editors couldn't find suitable reviewers. They actually told me then what was the issue. In the end they got four in the end because people then went back to them. So there was something else about that that I was going to say and it's gone now. OK, well it's really interesting to hear a little bit more about the nitty-gritty of the job of an editor. How many parliamentary affairs, how many, roughly, submissions do you get each month that you will have to look at? It's really difficult. I remember I was going to talk about how many submissions and the timings. It's really difficult to judge because there's timings of the year where we get loads, the other times when we don't get anything. So at the end of the summer we usually get quite a few and then towards Christmas again we get quite a few. And then between when the academic year is on basically we tend not to get many and then lots are submitted. So it's difficult to say how many but at some average we probably get maybe just about two or three on average. But as I said parliamentary affairs is a very specialised journal so we get far fewer than other journals. So somewhere like political studies or the comparative politics, the bigger journals, they get far more than that. But they also have bigger editorial teams to go through that. And as an editor what do you look for? What's the first thing you look for in a submission? That's really important because that's actually the sort of things that people sometimes don't think about. But one thing that's really important is the title. It might seem just a silly thing but the title is so useful. And the amount of times I get the submission and the title just means nothing. And I look at it as thinking but what is this about? And if I'm thinking that then that means the reviewers are going to think that. Which means the reviewers might say no I'm not reviewing because I don't know what it is. It also might be that they get the wrong idea about what it is and they might not understand why we're inviting them. Although we try to make them the request as individual to each review as possible. Though that takes time obviously. And then the other key thing I'd say is the abstract. So the abstract again quite often people do it like 10 minutes job before submitting a journal. Please never do that. The abstract is so, so important. It really is important. Definitely do it at the end if you've done your article because it's only once you've got your article ready that you know what it is about rather than writing it at the beginning. Don't do a summary or a copy and paste of your introduction. I see that a lot. It communicates sloppiness. It communicates laziness. It communicates the fact that you don't realise how important the abstract is. Because the abstract is the window into your journal article. Once it's published you'll be online and anyone will move on to read your article if the abstract is clear, communicates what it is about and what the findings are. And any assessment, whatever their career is, whatever it is, the first thing people will do like an overall assessment of an article will be through the abstract. So do spend some time on the abstract. So the abstract should situate what the article is about. What's the question it's trying to answer? What is it trying to address? Sometimes the abstracts are just background information because sometimes they're just a copy and paste of introduction. It's more about setting out what is it about, what's the key question, what are the key methods used or the approach used, and then finishing the key findings, what were the key findings. And a good abstract goes a long, long way in portraying, in disseminating an article because if it's a good abstract then people will be inclined to read your article. So as an editor, likewise, the abstract is really important. So that's the first thing I'll look at and that, depending on the topic, might give me straightaway ideas about who to ask for for reviewers. And then if that doesn't get what we tend to do, and that's a really good tip, is to look at the bibliography and see who are these people, who are the people being cited, who are the people likely to know about it. Because as someone submitting an article, you have to remember that we, as editors, we're not experts on everything. I know loads of our parliament, I've been doing it for 30 years, but I don't know about a lot of specifics, I don't know the literature, the authors. So if some topics are on a straightaway which reviews to ask for others, I wouldn't. So I would look at the bibliography and that would give me a sense of who are the key people writing in that area. But also, then there's a process of are they likely to do a review for you or not. So you also have to balance that out. One thing I think it's useful to know is that if it's a journal article about a specific country or specific parliament, we would always include someone who knows about that area. So we may have, so we usually go for three reviewers. In some cases, we might just go for two. In other cases, we might go for four depending on how many different views we need. And that depends on the article. And so if we're going for three reviewers, it may be that it's two on the theme. So say it's something about parliamentary bills and whether men and women submit different types of bills, which is a type of article we get a lot. I may have an expert on legislation. I might have an expert on gender and parliament. And then say it's something in Taiwan or in Angola or US. I'll have an expert from that case study. And so the expert from that case study, from that country will be able to check are there any things in here that we wouldn't spot that are completely wrong. Are they missing on some crucial party or crucial procedure, something like that. And then the other sort of the more subject expertise are going to read in terms of, is this telling us anything to our discipline? Is this adding to what we know about gender and parliament? Is this adding to what we know about legislative politics? So that's how we go about choosing reviewers. But it's really difficult to get reviewers these days. And so a lot of time is spent on drafting, making sure you... But also the other thing is that you don't want to waste reviewers time. So you don't want to send something that you can see is going to be rejected. And that's why the journals that get lots of submissions, they reject a lot because they only have a certain pool of reviewers and they don't want to be sending out things they know will be rejected or very likely to be rejected. So the way we use the time of our reviewers, it's a crucial part of what we do as editors. So the first stage is that it goes to the editor. They may feel it doesn't fit with the theme of the journal. But if they do, we'll go out to peer reviewers. It can take some time for those reviewers to come back. What would be your advice on dealing with the responses from the reviewers? Because they can be quite critical. Especially when you've worked so hard on an article. What would your advice on the feedback that people get and how to deal with it? Yes, that's a really difficult part of the process, receiving the reviews and reading it. And to be honest about it, they tend to be quite brutal, quite negative. Even if they haven't been written in that sense, I do lots of reviews to other journals, almost as a part of my own duty. I always try to be as constructive as possible. I always try to point out what's really good about it and to be as specific as possible. Being helpful about things could improve. But I think sometimes, even if you write yourself, you think you're being constructive and you find out we're doing feedback to students, it's the same process that they will read in a different way. They will read, oh, it's all terrible. Even if it's not, even if it's just identifying things to improve. So I think it's a bruising process, regardless. And I think my advice would be that when you get those comments, don't take them as personal. Don't take them as saying that the article's got no chance whatsoever. Because if the editor has given you an opportunity to revise and to resubmit, it's because they think it's good. If they thought it wasn't good, they wouldn't give you that chance. They would reject it. So the comments that, when you actually read the comments, obviously they tend to be anonymous, which makes people think, I always think that anything anonymous is more brutal for one reason or another. So if I give feedback face to face to a student, I can see their reaction, I can explain things, I can see that's a word I've said might be misinterpreted, I can do lots of things. If I write and type in feedback and the student takes away and reads elsewhere, and I don't know who that student is, I write the feedback as anonymously, then it's completely different, they're willing to have a different way. And I think we'd review the same thing. So my advice is when you get it, just remember it's a good article, otherwise you would not get a chance to review it. And then take the comments that you receive as an opportunity, to make your article being relevant, being read by a wider audience, because what the reviewers are doing is just asking questions about it. And if they're asking questions, it might be that sometimes we are, the people who write our articles, we know so much about it already. There's so many things that are just clear that we don't actually see the other things. And what the reviewers are doing is just showing, look, there's these other things, this wasn't very clear. And have you considered something else? So I'll take it as an opportunity to actually improve your article, and I'll try to get over the fact that it's negative. Just take it for granted, it will feel negative. I mean I'll get reviews all the time obviously as an editor, and it's just in the nature of what it is. Now obviously there are cases where reviewers can be particularly brutal, but that's a question, you know, we're all humans and some people are not very nice. But my advice would be if the editor gives you the opportunity to review, just forget about the negativity and try to make the most in terms of addressing those comments. Then there's an issue about how you respond to that. Do you want me to go through that now? Yeah, it'd be interesting because you don't have to make all the changes that are suggested. And sometimes when you have two or more reviewers, they can actually be contradictory in what they say. So how to deal with that? First of all, you'd hopefully have an editor that says that some of the comments on the reviewers might be contradictory. And so hopefully you'd get some guidance from editors saying, realise that this is contradictory, can you please follow more review or two? Something like that. I would always follow the advice, the lead of the editor. So I had a situation like that recently as a writer, as a journal, as an article writer, where I had four reviews and two of them were completely contradictory. One of them was completely off, just didn't really get anything about the article. And between the four, there's just so many comments in there. It would have been really difficult to address all of them and still keep a coherent article that was still my research. And the editor was just excellent in that. He just said from these, these are all the points I wanted to address. Now that doesn't always happen and most of the time people only have two reviews anyway or three. But I would always say that when you do your review, when you do the changes, take note of what the editor tells you. And then when you do your changes or when you send an article back, do you send a document outlining in detail, as clear as possible, what changes you made in what way that addresses the comments of the reviewers. And in some cases, if you think the comments that the reviewers made, that you just can't act on them because it would be a different research. Because sometimes reviewers say, well, this is the right question. You should have gone and read that. Then you just have to be very honest about it and say, look, I thought this would be a completely different article, so I didn't address that. But always also be polite in a way you do that and appreciative of the comments. Even when you receive the review, you might feel quite mad at the reviewers. When it gets upon the responding, remember to thank the comments received and appreciate how it made you think about the article in a different way. And then outline in a document exactly how you did all the changes. I would even go as far as saying that it depends on the scale of the changes. But if you can highlight in your revised article, either by highlighting or different color writing or whatever, the bits that you changed, even that would be really helpful. So anything to then help the editor. And quite often then that goes back to reviewers. So anything that helps in terms of clarity to clarify which points you addressed it in what way and which ones you didn't, but why. All of that then ensures that it will be accepted. That's really interesting. Good sort of hacks for how to... In general though, what strategies do you think young researchers could adopt to get on this publishing ladder? Because I think the hurdle is that first piece of work that is submitted. How can that be made easier? Or what would you recommend as a strategy for getting on the publishing ladder? There's a number of different things you can do. One of them is actually to try to be a reviewer yourself. So sometimes we often struggle with reviewers from outside the UK or from outside countries we know really well. The US, France and that sort of countries. And for instance if I had an article on Ethiopia, I mean now I might know some contacts thanks to the P4B. But if it was about a country like, I don't know, Kenya let's say, South Korea. I mean actually there are some names in there that probably would come to me. But there are lots of case studies that we don't necessarily have a lot. Our pool of review is not very big. And so there's no harm whatsoever in people contacting the journals and saying look I'm a political scientist. I work in Ethiopia. I've done all of these online publications. This is my record or this is my research. And so a particularly young researcher, even if they don't have a lot of publications done yet, they can say this is the research I'm in. I'd be really interested to know how the reviewing process is. So if you ever have something that falls within these areas, it doesn't have to be about my country. It can be about these areas. I would really appreciate the opportunity to act as a reviewer. There can always be a top up for instance. And it's always useful to have another voice. So that's something that young researchers sometimes will review as we go sort of to professor's and senior level. But actually I try to bring in young researchers that I know of as much as possible because they quite often have more time, actually more careful at reading the article. And they can give a different point of view. So that's one thing people could do. Another thing that again I try to do with my own PhD students is core writing an article. So they may take the lead, so I'm doing that with a student now. They may take the lead in the article and they may even have the name first and all of that. But the fact that I am core authoring with them, it gives them the confidence in moving forward. It gives them all the advice about the structure of the article, something I haven't spoken about, and the structure of the article is really important. And any advice I'm giving you now, I can give all that advice to my PhD student or to any young researcher as we core write. So I've done that with quite a few people and I think that's something that works really well. So core writing with someone else, preferably someone with a bit more experience so that you can benefit from that. It's a good way of getting on the publication ladder. You mentioned structure. What is a good structure for an article? Do you have a template? There's a bit of a tension there. It's spreading more and more a specific structure which I don't particularly like but you see a lot. So it's a structure that works where you have your introduction, a very long introduction where you set out all the key research questions and all that. Then you have a section which is almost like the theory of hypothesis come out. Then you have a section which is the findings and then you have a section which is discussion. That's becoming more and more standard type of structure. I wouldn't go against that because I know it's one tradition of doing articles but in my view that's quite a lazy way of doing things and I think it's better if it has a structure that actually has more meaning. It's not just findings, it's discussion. It's what does it mean so that the heading is actually indicating what that area is. So there's another side to do the structures which is much more about. I would still say always have an introduction that introduces the rest of the article, introduces the key question and what the rest of the article is going to do and that's really important. That's usually followed by a theoretical section that sets out the key theories, what they've talked about that, and then the methodology. After that, that's where I differ from the other position I was telling you before. I would then present the findings and discuss them as I go along by the relevance. So I may have maybe two other headings which are the key areas that I want to explore in the article and then a conclusion do a summary of it all and perhaps point out to possible future research. But sometimes the structures the theory gets mixed up with the findings, the methodology is not there, even if it's qualitative methodology where people think well I just did some interviews but there's still things to say about the interviews. It's still useful to have a methodology and the headings are really important signposting, so signposting for the reviewer, for the editor, what is this about because you know what it is about but anyone reading it should also understand what it is so as you're writing it and thinking of your structure you think of it in terms of guiding the reader. So in all of this you've talked about title, abstract, structure, headings always be thinking about the reader and considering how they think because obviously you will know this material perfectly as the author but you can't be thinking about the reader. That's really really helpful and I've certainly learnt a lot. Can you just give one maybe final piece of advice or encouragement for the scholars that will be at the P4P workshop of McKaylee? I'd say definitely persevere at trying to publish and I'm very happy for anyone to contact me. I think Amati is one of the mentors anyway for any further advice and I think it is difficult. I had a similar discussion in Brazil just now in the summer because I was talking to scholars in Brazil and they were saying how difficult they find to publish in international journals and I think and they do excellent work really really good work and I think it's all about how you communicate it and that is really the key barrier is to think how is your study of relevance for an international audience and perseverance is really really important. I would also probably start with what we call the lower impact factor journals just because it's more realistic that articles would be considered from someone that doesn't have a lot of experience and then once you go through the process once actually after that everything is much easier. I mean the review is always brutal but the process or how you deal with it becomes much easier. So I would say perseverance use the people from P4P and always think about maybe reaching out to maybe journals with a low impact factor at the beginning rather than going for the very high ranking ones. Brilliant, thank you ever so much for Christine and not just for me but also for everyone who's going to be at the workshop because I'm sure they'll really appreciate everything you said. Thank you.