Eager to start writing but don’t know what types of scholarly articles is the best outlet for your research? Find out what you can publish!
Having just finished your experiments or collected all the necessary survey data is exciting. You’ve discovered something no one discovered before and pushed the boundary of knowledge one step ahead, solving particular research challenges, making our life better, safer, more viable and so on. But as a Motivated Academic, you are expected to communicate your research with others. And the best way to do it is to publish your work in scholarly journals.
Now I know you’re eager to start writing your manuscript and share your outstanding research with your scholarly community. But how do you do it? What are the appropriate types of scholarly articles you should consider? Sometimes it’s easy to select the most appropriate format for your paper, although there are many types of scholarly articles. This is easy especially when you want to share your innovative research outcome or literature review. But there are more types of scholarly articles that you can leverage to maximise your research output.
Here, I’ll give you an overview of the types of scholarly articles you can consider in your research. By the way, this is an extract of the working version of the book that I’ve started writing some time ago – would you be interested in getting a copy once it’s ready?
Table of Contents
What are specific types of scholarly articles?
When doing a literature review for your research project, you must have noticed that there are several different types of scholarly articles that you can use to share your research. It really depends on what is your research is about, and what kind of outputs you produce that dictate the type of scholarly articles you would go for.
The main types of scholarly articles are a research article and a review article. These are the most common types of articles published by researchers worldwide. In general, the former aims to present the state-of-the-art research outputs, whereas the latter aims to provide a critical review of your research area. And in most cases, you will be fine by just knowing these two types of articles.
However, there are also different types of scholarly articles that you can use to promote your work better. I get you. Sometimes you may feel like you have something very specific to share with your research community, but it may not be enough for either review or a research paper. You may just want to share your perspective or your own opinion about the subject.
Luckily for you, there are different types of scholarly articles publications that enable you to do it! For example, you may have heard about short communications or perspective papers that are much shorter than research papers. You may have noticed also noticed mini-review articles or short reviews. From my experience, I can share that there are lots of different types of scholarly articles, but we can distinguish 6 main types that I will talk about in this article:
- research article
- review article
- mini-review article
- perspective article
- short communication article
- comments
What makes it confusing is the fact that each publisher tends to name these papers differently. For example, some publishers allow you to publish short communications. Another publisher may call it a feature article. Some publishers allow you to publish a perspective article, an article type that is sometimes called an opinion article. It’s just a bit confusing.
How to deal with this? Well, the best way is to actually check the details with the scholarly journal that you’re interested in and read their guidelines for authors. Remember, if you want to publish in a new journal, it is always a very good idea to read the guidance for authors and check their recently published articles. This will help you tailor your work better to that journal and increase your chances of getting published there right.
Below, I will review the main types of manuscripts that you can come across with different scholarly publishers. I’m going to write this on on the example of Energy and Environmental Science that is published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. This is because I published both a review paper and a research paper with them and I believe this is one of the best journals in the energy area. I’m really proud of my work published with them. I also found the guidance for authors very straightforward and explained