Happy Tuesday, everyone, and welcome back to Grad Pod! This week, we’re diving into the world of scholarly publishing with Katharine Miller from VCU Libraries to discuss how graduate students can navigate finding the right journals, avoiding publication scams, and utilizing library resources to get their research out into the world!
Note: If you’re curious about journals publishing null results, Katharine recommends PLOS ONE: https://collections.plos.org/collection/missing-pieces/
She also sent us this great article about how the vast majority of scholars think null results are valuable but far fewer end up publishing them: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02312-4
Thanks for joining us, Katharine!
GRACE: Hello, happy Tuesday, and welcome to Grad Pod. This week we’re talking publishing. Publication is, understandably, a major preoccupation for nearly all graduate students, and sometimes it can feel like there’s no good place to start. So what resources are there for students who may not know where to begin?
Today, we’re joined by Katharine Miller from VCU Libraries to find out. Hi, Katharine. How are you?
KATHARINE: I’m great. How are you?
GRACE: Doing well. Welcome to Grad Pod.
KATHARINE: It’s great to be here.
GRACE: Would you like to introduce yourself?
KATHARINE: Sure. So I’m Katharine Miller. My official job title is Scholarly Communications Librarian, which is kind of a librarian buzzword term, “scholarly communications.” But it really does describe all of the ways that scholars communicate with each other. Traditionally, that is through journal publishing or book publishing, but more and more as more people move online and engage in social media, there are a lot more ways to communicate outside of those traditional means. And so that is another area of work that I consult with authors on occasion.
GRACE: I feel like every time I turn around, VCU Libraries is introducing me to another librarian. And at this point, I think I need some kind of stage review where you guys sort of dance on from one side and introduce yourselves and dance off again because there are so many of you, which is fantastic. Like, the resources of the library feel genuinely never-ending in a way that is just delightful.
KATHARINE: Yeah. And it’s funny you mention that. So when I started here about 10 years ago, my position was a completely newly created position for VCU Libraries. And it was fairly new to have these kinds of positions in libraries at the time. It has become much more normal to have them, obviously. But it’s definitely an area where librarians have moved into this space versus just collecting things that are published to publishing journals and books ourselves—which I will mention a little bit more on—and consulting with people on their publishing.
And it is funny, another area, for example, moving into is podcasting, which is perfect for me to be here because that’s an area where if you’ve been to The Workshop, or we have space as well in the Health Sciences Library, we have podcasting spaces. We have equipment you can check out to do this, and that’s just another way that a lot of scholars now are choosing to get the word out about their research.
GRACE: That’s—I hadn’t really thought about podcasts. I mean, I should have, but I had not thought about them from like a specifically academic publishing standpoint. But that makes perfect sense. So tell me about the resources that you have specifically for graduate students.
KATHARINE: Sure. So I am a part of a division called Digital Libraries and Publishing. We have a lot of publishing expertise on the one hand simply because this is something we do a lot. So this is the department that houses our open educational resources initiative, which some students at VCU may be familiar with if you’ve ever used a free online openly licensed textbook that was created possibly by one of your faculty or adopted by one of your faculty. We assist faculty with creating these kinds of alternatives to high-cost textbooks.
We digitize and make digital collections freely available online—things from our collections like the unique history of Richmond and Virginia. As I mentioned before, we have a platform, an institutional repository and publishing platform here called Scholars Compass, and that is where academic journals that we publish and books that we assist with are published.
And another reason that graduate students might be familiar with that platform and the work we do there is if you write a thesis or dissertation, that is the platform where those are going to be made available to everyone online. Pro tip: if you are doing one of those theses or dissertations, that also means you can go look there and get ideas for things as detailed as formatting requirements or best ways to break down a dissertation into chapters, things like that.
GRACE: Scholars Compass is very cool. And also pro tip: once you have uploaded your thesis to Scholars Compass, you can see when people cite it and download it, and it’s a very gratifying, fun little thing to do and just be like, “Who’s looking at my stuff today?”
KATHARINE: It’s amazing the usage that we get from those. I mean, it’s really just amazing because VCU students are doing incredible, unique research. You get a map that shows you where from all over the world people are downloading your work.
The same thing if you do a research poster. Like if anyone has participated or thinks of participating in the Graduate Research Symposium, we have a section of Scholars Compass where you can upload that work. Similarly to a thesis or dissertation, those get a lot of downloads because, of course, they represent some of the most cutting-edge research that is going on at our institution.
GRACE: At its best, I feel like scholarly publishing makes the world feel quite small in a really cool way.
KATHARINE: Yep. So all of that translates into the work we do more directly with supporting students, and that is an area that is sort of my particular niche, which is why I’m here to share more today.
As a part of my job, I consult with authors when it comes time to publish, and obviously that includes students because we have a lot of students who are publishing or interested in publishing. In that role, if students have ever worked with a subject librarian—because we have huge teams of librarians who specialize in the disciplines for each of our schools and departments—that’s someone you can make an appointment with to have a consultation over Zoom or just send a question over email when you’re needing some assistance with research.
I work in a very similar way, so we can set up a time to talk more about creating a list of potential journals to target. I can come and teach in classes if there are faculty who are interested in having their students get an overview of how the publishing process even works, because it’s not necessarily something that you’re learning in your curriculum as a graduate student. And so that’s the kind of thing that I can work with students on from the very basic—like, “I don’t understand how this process works and what should I be doing”—to “I’m ready to publish and I need to find a journal to publish in.”
GRACE: When I was a graduate student, I remember a professor wrote a note on a paper I did that was like, “You should consider publishing this.” And during his office hours, I went and was like, “Cool. How? What do you mean?” And his response was basically just like, “Well, you know, just keep trying.” And I was like, “In what way?” So yeah, we gotta get you in the classroom more.
KATHARINE: Yeah. So I will say on that note, there are probably a couple of in-between steps or areas where a faculty mentor may be a little bit more helpful, and there are some places where there might be gaps in support.
One question that we do get a lot is, “I just want help writing.” And that’s not something we can do here; that’s something we would send people to the Writing Center for.
GRACE: We have a whole Writing Center. They’ve been on the podcast. They’re very good at what they do.
KATHARINE: Yes, they are.
GRACE: So by the time you come onto the scene, I theoretically should be showing up with a completed work that is done or basically done and looking to get it out into the world, not continuing to refine it.
KATHARINE: Yes. Although, I will say sometimes there are standards that are specific to journals that if you have questions about what you should be doing to get something ready to be submitted for a journal, that may be something I can help with. But really, probably what I will say is the same tip with writing a thesis or a dissertation on Scholars Compass: go and look at the articles that a journal has published and you will start to see the sections they expect.
Another thing that could be a joint effort—between me, a subject librarian who’s going to have a little bit more disciplinary knowledge, and maybe a faculty mentor—is talking about what type of article you are even writing. Because there are certain types. There is the concept of the original research article, which students may be familiar with—it’s got the intro, the methods section, the results, the conclusion.
But sometimes students are writing something more like a literature review or a systematic review, or we have students in the health sciences sometimes who are interested in publishing a case study for something that they have encountered. Different journals may specialize in different areas, so that’s one thing you have to think about as well: the type of article. And then with something like case studies, there is a more limited set of journals who accept that type of article.
GRACE: So you are helping students, to an extent, kind of parse the field and point them in the direction of where their work might be best suited to land.
KATHARINE: Yes.
GRACE: That makes sense. I mean, that’s an extremely useful resource. Like, the world of scholarly publishing is huge.
KATHARINE: It’s huge, and it’s always growing, and it’s always changing. One of the ways that it’s changing—and I find that students are walking into a very different publishing landscape than it was 10 years ago—is the concept or the model of open access, which is very common now because a lot of the major, largest commercial publishers have adopted this model.
It used to be much less common, and so I find a lot of the times people want to publish open access because what that means is that when they publish their work, readers are not ever going to require a subscription to access it. They’re not gonna hit a paywall. It will be openly accessible to everyone in the world.
But one of the tricky things that comes with that is there are a lot of journals that charge a fee for publishing. And so actually, I think one of the most challenging things right now when people come to me is they often want to prioritize those open access journals. But especially as graduate students who don’t have grant funding or research funding, they may struggle obviously to pay those costs because they can be substantial—they can be in the thousands of dollars. So it is tricky sometimes to do that.
We do luckily have some agreements at the libraries and through our state library consortium that cover those fees, and it’s very exciting that they cover for all VCU authors, and that does include students. But it doesn’t cover every journal that people might want to publish in. So that is an area where I always encourage people to reach out, because what you don’t want is to get very excited about a journal, submit, and get accepted, and then they say, “Great, that will be $2,000 to publish.”
GRACE: Is this becoming more common, would you say, that students are needing to pay for their publication? I come from a creative writing background originally, and so more of commercial publishing. If you are accepted for publication and they turn around and say, “Great, give us $2,000,” generally you’re advised to say, “No thank you,” and walk away. But this has become pretty common in academic publishing, right?
KATHARINE: Yes. That would be a huge red flag. I think the phrase in creative writing is “money should flow toward the author,” right?
GRACE: Yes.
KATHARINE: And in academic, money tends to flow toward the publisher, sometimes from multiple streams. Typically, the model for a very long time was that authors at institutions like ours—you know, we’re a publicly funded institution, and it’s a job expectation that you will be publishing your research—would write the article, send it to the publisher, sign over copyright to the publisher, and the publisher would turn around and sell it back to academic institutions.
Now, there is some serious work that goes into managing publishing: managing the peer review process, making things accessible online, building these platforms that are searchable, all of the copy editing and layout of digital documents. There is a lot of work that goes into it.
But open access was a response to say, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re doing the writing. We’re doing the peer review for free. We have people getting maybe some compensation to be a journal editor for these journals, but why are we essentially paying twice to support the research, and then to buy it back?”
So this is a model where the goal is to make those costs more transparent and say, “This is what it costs for an article to do all of that work, and we want to try to pay it upfront, and then make that work accessible to everyone.” There’s a lot of strong, altruistic reasons for that, right? There are disparities between institution sizes and funding, and how much research they can afford to buy and access for their researchers and students. There are members of the public who should be able to access this research as well, and not hit paywalls. But it can make it a little bit tricky sometimes now to find those sources of funding.
GRACE: So the argument is that you as a scholar are helping to underwrite the expenses of hosting and editing and peer review as part of the publication, and you are contributing to the project of keeping it free and accessible on the reader end.
KATHARINE: Yeah, and really just trying to push a different set of values onto publishing—that we don’t just want this to be a commercialized product that is sold for as much money as people are willing to pay for it. We’re trying to push it in a direction where we can make it accessible to everyone and give everyone the chance to benefit from it as much as possible.
GRACE: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, it’s a complicated world, and that is why it’s so nice to have you on hand to help students navigate it. As the listeners heard, my instincts would have been dead wrong in this situation because of my background. So tell me more about picking through the journal landscape.
KATHARINE: Yeah. So I would kind of break these down into maybe two areas to think about: one where I think librarians like me can really help authors assess their options, and one where I think that maybe faculty mentors are better able to help assess.
Starting with the librarians, we can think about things like discipline, which on one hand probably sounds really straightforward—you’re like, “I’m in the biology department, I’m gonna look for biology journals.” But there are so many more journals now than there were 10, 20, 30 years ago, and they’re so much more niche. They’re getting into really specific disciplines, and then you have the entire concept of interdisciplinarity. Where does yours best break down?
Some of that can depend on the topic of your article, but even then, it could break down into multiple audiences. Are you looking for a journal where it’s firmly in one field, and it would be great if some readers in other fields see it because it has some overlap? Or are you really looking to get the word out as broadly as you can, and so maybe you’re looking for a journal that has that interdisciplinary focus?
We talked a bit also about how the type of article can change which journal you’re going to: original research, review articles, case studies. Some journals are going to focus more on quantitative results and have a little less focus on qualitative. There are entire journals that are more dedicated to qualitative research.
And then the methodology too can have an impact. There are some journals that maybe are somewhat limited to more traditional methodologies, but if you’re doing newer methodologies within your field, maybe there are different journals who are going to be more interested.
At a first level, it really is digging down into the journal scope. It’s looking at the kinds of things that they are publishing. Do they have special issues coming up that fit into yours? Which actually brings to mind a little side note: you mentioned this idea of how in creative writing it could be a red flag if someone says, “Sure, I’ll publish your work, just give me $2,000.” There are journal scams that happen sometimes.
GRACE: Oh.
KATHARINE: Yeah. One of the classic ways this comes to people’s attention is targeted emails saying, “Dear Dr. So-and-So”—when you are not yet a doctor—”We’re really excited about publishing your research. Please submit it here. You only have 10 days until the special issue closes. It’s the very low cost of only two or three hundred dollars. The peer review is gonna be so fast, we’ll get it done in two weeks.” That’s kind of the classic set of red flags you would see with this kind of thing.
Luckily, state law in Virginia years ago took student emails off of our public websites, which I hope has resulted in our students getting less of these, because typically faculty emails get scraped from websites. I’ve gotten sent some of these before where it’s not even in my area of research and they’re asking me to submit to an upcoming special issue or special conference. So that is one to watch for as well.
GRACE: Where should students go, or who should they reach out to if they are worried that they’re dealing with a journal that might not actually be real? Should they contact you?
KATHARINE: Yes. Contact me, or just the library’s main “Ask Us” email, library.vcu.edu, and that will get sent to me. That is definitely the kind of thing where I can help you assess and look for those kinds of red flags.
To be honest, sometimes it’s obvious—people may understand what an email scam looks like. But I’ve also seen some really beautiful-looking websites that people have built, because it’s easier than ever to build a public website. And then you scrape just a little under the surface and you say, “Oh, this only has three articles on its homepage that look legitimate,” and then there’s nothing more.
GRACE: You can build a pretty nice website if you’re getting $300 a pop from students who don’t know any better.
KATHARINE: Yes. And unfortunately, it’s not just students; faculty get caught up in this as well, because there is this idea—graduate students may have heard the phrase before—”publish or perish.” There can be in academia a real pressure to publish and publish quickly. And so those kinds of scams where someone is saying, “The peer review is gonna be so quick, you’re gonna be able to get this on your CV just like that,” can be a real draw for people who are very busy and trying to get those publications out.
GRACE: Man, there is a scam for every niche need in the universe at this point. That’s wild. Well, thank you for the heads-up on that. That’s very useful information.
So before we wrap up, if a student wants to reach out to you, where and how do they find you? And what should they have ready before they initiate contact?
KATHARINE: Sure. So the best thing, let’s say you have an article that you’re ready to go, is to send the article, or at minimum send the title and the abstract. One really big thing would be your references section, because the first tip I give to people is there’s a good chance that the journals in your references section are gonna be your best leads on where to publish, because obviously they’ve been publishing the kind of research that you’re citing in your article.
From there, I can take a look and we can set up a time to go over some of the results I’ve found. I really like to meet, even if it’s just a quick half hour with people, to show them how I have been able to use some of the tools we have. We have databases like Web of Science, which is a journal indexing platform. It’s very helpful for finding information about journals, but it’s a pretty advanced platform with a lot of information on it, not all of which is useful to a graduate student just trying to understand their journal options.
There are tools out there like manuscript matcher tools from different publishers where you put in your title and abstract and it recommends journals. So it’s helping people understand the tools that are available, but then what’s next? Because you can get this list of 10 or so journals, and then where do you go from there? How do you drill down further and decide what is most important to you, and where do you find that information on all of these journal websites? It can be its own research project, actually. So for anyone doing it for the first time, I would love to sit down and meet with them and walk them through that process.
GRACE: That’s great, and it’s great that you are available for that level of assistance, especially for people who are doing it for the first time. Well, I have one last question for you, but before that, is there anything else that you would really like to make sure that the grad students of VCU take away with them?
KATHARINE: Yeah, sure. So I almost forgot, I mentioned earlier there’s a set of things that I think maybe faculty mentors might be better able to help you assess about your articles. And that’s things like the idea of novelty—how new are your results or your methodology? Something like the robustness or impact of results—how advanced is this work in terms of the methodology you used? How exciting or novel are the results?
All of that is really getting into this challenge or issue within journal publishing: the concept of prestige. Students may have heard of the “impact factor,” which is a ranking. It’s actually a proprietary metric that is owned by the same company who owns the Web of Science database that tries to rank journals based on the average number of citations that their articles tend to receive. And so while that’s a helpful metric for knowing how selective a journal is—once they start to get highly ranked, they can be very selective about only selecting very new, very exciting articles that they think might get a lot of citations and keep them high in the rankings—versus journals who maybe aren’t as highly ranked. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with journals who rank lower within their discipline.
Talking to a faculty mentor about where to fit into that idea of journal rankings is important. Of course, you don’t wanna fall for a scam that gets you peer review done in two weeks where they might just slap it up online with no changes, but you don’t want to aim so high that you get rejected outright after a three-month wait, or end up going through a peer review process for six months and then still get rejected and have to turn around and do it again and again. So there is some calculation there about making sure you’re fitting into the right place with journal selectivity to get your work out there.
GRACE: You’re not necessarily aiming for fast food, but nor are you going for fine dining every time. Sometimes you are aiming for like the Village Cafe. It’s been open for 50 years. The chicken salad sub is always the same.
KATHARINE: Which is just good enough to get you to order it again.
GRACE: And that’s good. The world is built on journals like the Village Cafe.
All right, so my last question for you: if you were to start your own academic journal tomorrow—not for your job, but for you, Katharine Miller, The Katharine Miller Journal—what would you call it and what would it be?
KATHARINE: Oh my gosh. I think the journal may already exist, actually. Or if it doesn’t, maybe there is one similar to it.
I think it’s really exciting when journals are willing to publish what are called null results. That’s when you had a hypothesis, you tested it, and nope, it wasn’t right. There’s not necessarily anything as novel or exciting about that, right? You’re not gonna get published in the top-ranked journals, and you’re not gonna get a CNN news article on a new link between whatever and cancer. But it’s important to know that we tried something, and as far as we can tell, there is no connection here.
I think it is good to be getting those results out as well because it gives us a bigger, better picture. Or even failed studies, right? Like, “Here, this messed up, and we wanna let you know that this is an issue and everyone should be aware of it.”
GRACE: I would read the hell out of a journal where that was just wall-to-wall, like, “It didn’t work.” Just title it like Womp Womp. “We were wrong.” If that does exist, will you email it to me?
KATHARINE: I will, yes.
GRACE: Listeners, if it does exist and Katharine sends it to me, I will put it in the show notes because I think I’m probably not the only one who wants to read an entire journal of just like, “Nope. Sorry.”
Oh, that’s amazing. Well, thank you so much, Katharine, for joining us.
KATHARINE: Yeah, thank you for having me.
GRACE: And thank all of you for joining us for another episode of Grad Pod. We will be back in two weeks with more grade-A VCU grad school content. I don’t know what it will be yet, but it’ll be something, and we’ll see you then. Bye!
CREDITS: Grad Pod is produced by VCU’s Graduate School. Haya Hamid is our host. Our producer and editor is Grace Albritton. Our theme music was composed, performed, and recorded by Austin Selleck and Claudia Andrade, students of Felipe Leitao, assistant professor of composition and sound design at VCU School of the Arts. Do you have a question for us? Email us at gradschool@vcu.edu and we may answer your question on an episode.
