Electronic Highways

Preparing and Submitting Manuscripts Using the Web to Guide You

Before writing or submitting a journal article, you will want to try to identify the most appropriate journal for its publication. Once you've done that, you'll also need to know who to send your manuscript to and in what format. One strategy for accomplishing these tasks is to use the World Wide Web.

Most journal publishers have Web pages nowadays. These Web pages provide useful information to prospective authors. This typically includes not only a detailed description of the aims and scope of a journal, but also its review policies and procedures, as well as its editorial staff. In addition, most journal Web pages also provide detailed instructions for preparing and submitting manuscripts, right down to the publisher's preferred style for formatting bibliographic references.

One way to find the Web pages of journals is to search the UB Libraries listing of Electronic Journals and Serials at http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/ejournals. This list, which currently provides descriptive information and links to more than 1,200 journal Web pages, can be browsed alphabetically by title or searched by keyword or subject. A work-in-progress, new titles are continually being added to the list. Since the journal you may want to submit your manuscript to may not yet be listed here, another strategy is to make use of a Web search engine, such as AltaVista (http://www.altavista.digital.com). With AltaVista, you can type in a journal's name inside quotation marks, e.g., "Marketing Education Review," and locate that journal's Web page, if it has one. Or, if you know who publishes the journal, you can access the publisher's Web site using one of the many publishers' lists on the World Wide Web, such as Faxon's Publishers on the Internet A-Z at http://www.faxon.com/html/it_pl_am.html. For a subject-oriented approach, you can use Yahoo at http://www.yahoo.com to find journals under any of a number of subject categories.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Nancy Schiller and Will Hepfer, University Libraries