Some Thoughts on Submitting Articles to the French Review

Abstract

Some Thoughts on Submitting Articles to the French Review Edward Ousselin As I mentioned in my editorial, this is my next-to-last issue as Editor in Chief of the French Review. Over the past twelve years, I have received more than 1,600 submitted articles, and I have edited and published nearly 600 of them (including occasional shorter articles and Dossiers pédagogiques). Before I started serving as Editor in Chief, I also had a fairly long history of submitting articles (a total of fifteen) to the French Review. I have therefore learned quite a lot about submitting articles—and about the mistakes many of us can make in the process. The purpose of this short text is to share some of the results of my experiences (in terms of both submitting and editing) with colleagues, especially younger colleagues and graduate students, who seek to publish in our journal. What follows will mainly consist of advice and reminders about some of the crucial factors that authors should keep in mind when preparing and submitting an article. Much of what follows might seem self-evident to more experienced colleagues who have already seen one or more of their articles published in the French Review. Nevertheless, as I have had ample opportunity to observe: Ce qui va sans dire va encore mieux en le disant. First of all, a few words about the broader professional context. The “publish or perish” mantra with which we are all familiar is still relevant. It is true that, for many colleagues, the pandemic has temporarily eased (as of this writing) the pressure to publish. Due to such factors as the need to adapt to distance learning, the closure of university libraries, and the cancellation of conferences (or their switch to an online format, which entails yet more time spent on Zoom), many universities have reduced or suspended their research and publication requirements for tenure and promotion. However, this unexpected hiatus is unlikely to last much longer. The publication imperative—and therefore the continuous process of preparing and submitting articles—will no doubt soon be restored to its central role in our careers. At the French Review (as well as at other scholarly journals), the Editor in Chief is the “interface” between the authors who submit articles and the Assistant Editors who evaluate them. Since the evaluation process is “double-blind” (the authors do not know the identities of the evaluators and the evaluators do not [End Page 199] know the identities of the articles’ authors), it is the Editor in Chief who sends to each author the outcome, positive or negative, of each evaluation process. While I take no pleasure at all in sending a message that begins with the phrase—“I regret to inform you that your article has not been accepted for publication...”—that is what I have been doing over the past twelve years for nearly two out three submitted articles. Readers should note in passing that this rate of rejection is, in comparative terms, not especially high: Some journals reject up to nine out of ten submitted articles. My hope in writing this short text is that a certain number of colleagues and graduate students will find it to be a concise and useful resource that will help them improve their articles at all levels—content, organization, format, and style—and thereby diminish the likelihood of receiving a message with the dreaded rejective phrase. To those readers who might say—Mais vous enfoncez des portes ouvertes!— I can only respond that, from my vantage point, many of the recommendations listed below do not appear to be commonly known—or at least followed. Nor do they seem to be emphasized or even mentioned at some of the graduate schools that train future teacher-scholars. As regards the content, I have frequently been surprised and frustrated, when first reading a submitted article, by the fact that many of them do not include a clearly stated research objective, which ought to be found within the first couple of pages. Due to the absence of such a statement, the reader must progressively discern, sometimes when reaching the last few pages of the article, what...