Publishing a peer-reviewed paper is an ambition for all entering academic careers, and a necessity for those remaining in it. It can feel a daunting, complex, and long process, but there is an art and skill to successfully publishing that can be learned. This chapter sets out to demystify and explain the processes involved, and how to maximise the chances of success. From writing a multi-author paper, through deciding author position, to choosing the right journal and dealing with reviewer comments.

Bonnie Marranca is the founding Editor and Publisher of PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and was María Irene Fornés’s publisher throughout her career. In this expansive conversation with performance studies scholar Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Marranca discusses her multifaceted history with Fornés and the importance of publication of both new plays and contemporary arts criticism. The exchange also captures Fornés’s distinctive personality, the complex intimacies of professional friendships, and the value of oral history as a form of performance documentation, while also providing a detailed glimpse into Fornés’s myriad connections, collaborations, and achievements within the downtown New York theatre scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

There is a strong case to be made for defining the early plays of the Dublin Trilogy as a series. A series is a sequence of related texts, and these texts occupy two states simultaneously: independence and interaction. The associated term ‘seriality’ describes the state of interaction between serial texts, and reflections on the operations of ‘seriality’ have emerged from a range of academic disciplines. This chapter examines O’Casey’s most famous writings in the context of serial narrative, serial publication, and serial consumption.

Latinx comics articulate popular understandings of Latinidad. However, in recent years, Latinx comics, like comics broadly, have become closely aligned with the university. Although much has been written about comics as objects of study, less has been said about the university as a site of publication. The shift in publication sites from small publishers to university presses entwines the comic book with the university’s thought and material conditions. While acknowledging how this open spaces for Latinx creators, the chapter investigates how this shift impacts Latinx thought. Do Latinx comics conform to academic understandings of Latinidad when published by a university? Can comics still incite vernacular understandings of Latinidad? Focusing on Alberto Ledesma’s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer, the anthology Tales from La Vida, and Leigh-Anna Hidalgo’s “augmented fotonovelas,” the chapter considers how artists negotiate the university’s influence. The chapter also shows how comic book aesthetics and the history of Latinx image-text cultural forms point us to forms of thought that resist, challenge, and supplement academic understandings.

Arriving at evidence-based solutions requires strong evidence. Usually, this evidence will be derived from quality research, such as is often published in reputable scientific journals. But how do we know whether even these studies are good through and through? There is always the potential that pesky flaws, such as bias and confounding, might can beset even the most (otherwise) perfect of studies. This is why the methods taken to avoid bias and confounding are always well-described in all good published studies, as is the potential for remaining sources of error for which the design is (inevitably) unable to account, but which might still influence findings. There is always a bit of uncertainty about any evidence provided by studies and, to add to this, the very real possibility that we are not getting the full story at all times. In a phenomenon known as ‘publication bias’, even really high quality studies may not get published if they report non-significant results.

Some of the practices that are believed to enhance the quality of science may produce bias. Studies with unexciting results may never be published, or results are selectively reported to highlight positive outcomes. Investigators often measure multiple outcomes while only reporting those with statistically significant findings. The best remedy for this problem is to require prospective declaration of study plans through study registration, such as the primary and secondary outcome variables and data analysis plans. Failure to report results of completed studies remains a serious problem. Further, results from many studies remain unpublished and the probability of publication is higher for positive results, leading to overestimates of treatment benefit. It is possible that some encouraging clinical trial findings are actually false positive results. For US Food and Drug Administration evaluations, data from a significant portion of relevant completed trials remain undisclosed at the time the pharmaceutical products are under evaluation.

What happens to submissions to a journal such as Research on Language and Social Interaction which publishes close, technically sophisticated analysis of interaction? What do its editors look for? We begin by explaining why submission might be desk-rejected: it might be simply unsuitable in topic or methodology for the journal, or it might be that it is somehow not quite up to standard. Methodologically sound work on a topic of interest to the EM/CA community will pass the first hurdle and be sent out for review by knowledgeable peers. Reviewers will report on the strength of the argument, the relation of the work to what is already known, and the quality of the analysis. Most papers at this stage will receive an encouraging invitation to revise and resubmit according to the reviewers’ comments and the editors’ recommendations. The revision, to pass the next stage, should be accompanied by a closely written, collegially written commentary on what the authors have done with the reviewers’ comments. The editors will scrutinize the revision and the covering letter very carefully; if all is well, then, with one last round of very minor tidying up, all is set for publication.

Forensic psychiatry, of all the specialties in medicine, needs its own strong academic core. Academic forensic psychiatry is founded in scientific research, with its systematic approach to making and recording observations, formulating hypotheses from them, testing those hypotheses with new observations and accumulating the most comprehensive picture possible in a way that is transparent and replicable. An academic approach supports application of scientific principles as strongly in the individual case as in developing relevant collective knowledge, is able to make links between them and can communicate all this effectively within and outside the specialty. This requires highly developed and defined specialist training. Academic forensic psychiatry in this sense is the business of all forensic psychiatrists. In order for forensic psychiatry to thrive, however, it is vital that some forensic psychiatrists further specialise in academic work in terms of additional training, time and immersion in skills that support accurate scientific questioning and testing and, ultimately, the capacity to innovate and keep this cycle active.

As Chapter 5 details, the theatrical promise of courtliness, prestige, and technological innovation attracted talented men and women who sought careers as dramatists. The duopoly, however, severely limited their opportunities, as did the ever growing backlog of old plays. After 1682, only one company remained to which they could sell their product, and overburdened payrolls consumed budgets that could otherwise be spent on new play development. Dramatists thus found themselves in the contradictory position of, on the one hand, affecting the gentility necessary for belonging to this exclusive cultural enterprise, and, on the other, chasing after diminishing opportunities like any common hack. And, finally, the theatre’s embrace of luxury and innovation made scarce another limited resource over which dramatists now competed: sumptuous scenic effects to adorn their scripts. By the end of the century, so deeply felt was disaffection with working conditions that few literary-minded writers took up drama as a profession, thereby establishing a pattern that would continue well into the eighteenth century.

Returning to some of the themes addressed in Chapter 3, this final chapter considers the wider social responsibilities of archaeologists working in southern Africa in the twenty-first century. Matters discussed include gender and racial equity within the discipline itself (especially with respect to South Africa), how best to relate the work done by archaeologists to the wider public, heritage management and conflicts over this (including the restitution of cultural sites, property, and human remains), the roles of contract archaeology, university teaching departments, and museums, the importance of publication, and the potential for developing post-colonial approaches to the interpretation of archaeological evidence. In highlighting possible future research trends, the chapter concludes by emphasising the need for work that is both intellectually sound and socially engaged and by reiterating the global significance of southern Africa’s immensely long and varied archaeological record.