The work of journal article publication is as old as the history of writing itself.  Academic publishing started in Europe during on Monday, 5 January 1665. Two months later saw the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which could become a crucial tool for academic publishing in the years that followed. Denis de Sallo is credited for establishing the first journal referred to as Journal des scavans that published content ranging from famous men, church history, and legal reports. Around this time, the practice of publishing scholarly content was being subjected to ridicule and controversies.

Early scientific journals embraced a variety of models. For example, there are some journals that were run by single individuals who had full control over the content and often engaging in publication of extracts from letters of colleagues. Other journals adopted a group decision-making process, which was more closely aligned to modern peer review process. It was not until mid-20^th century when peer review became a universal standard. Peer reviewing of journal articles to be published was to play a crucial role in the future of academia.    

If you want to publish in academic journals, your work must be thoroughly evaluated by more than one scholar with similar competencies as the one producing the work to be published. This is referred to as peer review. The purpose of peer review is to self-regulate journal article publication within the relevant field. Readers are usually looking for high quality information to make decisions and inform their research, hence, to publish a journal article these days requires a rigor process or review. The reasons for thorough reviews include but not limited to maintaining quality standards, improving performance, and providing credibility.

Given the rigor of this review, there is need to focus on suitability of your journal article for publication. Journal articles that do not meet the suitability criteria are usually rejected. You can avoid such rejection by strictly adhering to the instructions and criteria provided by a given credible journal. There are several generic steps that you must follow in order to prepare a high quality journal article. Read the steps and sections here.

While some journals have been criticized for not carrying out proper pre-publication review, credible journals such as Stratford Peer Reviewed Journal & Book Publishing have continued to support the idea of ensuring high quality in publication. Most of the journals that do not carry out stringent peer review fear losing customers, hence, relax their requirements in order to maintain and easily expand their market base. The problem with this is that they neutralize your brand as an author. This is why journals need to balance between the requirements of the scientific publishing and the author, but not be lenient to publish work that will embarrass the author both current and in the future.        

Given that manuscripts failing to meet the standards of a given journal are not published, it means that peer-reviewed articles that are accepted for publication exemplify the best research practices in a field under consideration. For a journal article to be accepted for publication, the impartial reviewers are tasked with the responsibility of accessing the quality of the manuscript in terms of structure, grammar, content and suitability for a given journal. Suggestions for revision may be suggested if the manuscript is appropriate, otherwise, it will be rejected.

What has become evident here is that scholarly publishing is becoming more complex with time. However, this should not discourage your vision of having several of your publications online or offline for purposes of helping others learn from your work. It is possible to achieve a successful journal article publication by being more careful about the requirements of a journal or selecting a journal that suits your subject area and doing an excellent work that will not be rejected. Go through our blog and learn other aspects related to success in publishing in a credible journal.