January, 2009
We spoke with Jessica Feinstein, Author Services Manager for Taylor & Francis.

What is the role of the Taylor & Francis Author Services Department?
We are here to answer your queries and to make sure that you have all the information you need to help you get your article published. As a department, we are always keen to know what authors want and how we can help you. We aim to make publishing with Taylor & Francis a rewarding experience for all our authors. The Author Services Department works very closely with the Journal Production Department, and we are involved in initiatives that focus on quality and service. We also regularly review all our suppliers (copy-editors, typesetters, and printers), monitor the quality of their work, and look at new options that will meet your changing requirements, e.g. for faster publication.
Can you tell us about some specific initiatives T&F has undertaken to help improve the author experience?
The first thing we did was to set up a special email address (authorqueries@tandf.co.uk) so that authors could get help fast. Another initiative has been the creation of an Authors’ Newsletter which is available on our website. We are also conducting a huge survey to find out what our authors think about their experience of publishing in a Taylor & Francis journal, and we will use these responses to improve our service. Quality is very important to us, and we want to help you make your article as good as it can be by giving you clear and detailed submission instructions, with a style sheet and Microsoft Word and LaTeX templates as required.
Approximately how many manuscripts do you receive for submission from Chinese authors? Do you know what percentage of these are eventually published with a T&F journal?
Judging by the queries we get, an increasing number of submissions are coming from Chinese authors. The total of Chinese authors in our database is now 7026, the third highest after the UK and USA (see chart below). To give you the figures for just one of our journals, submissions in 2008 from Chinese authors made up 30.4% of the total, of which 32 were accepted and 134 rejected.
Approximately how many manuscripts do you receive for submission from Japanese authors? Do you know what percentage of these are eventually published with a T&F journal
We get a lot of submissions from Japan. The total of Japanese authors in our database is 4587, which puts Japan in the top ten (see chart below). To give you the figures for just one of our journals, submissions in 2008 from Japanese authors made up 3.6% of the total, of which 3 were accepted and 14 rejected.

Many of our clients ask for help in selecting a journal, what advice can you offer them?
Once you have written an article, we can help you choose the most suitable journal for it. On our subject pages you can find a list of journals. Click on the Aims & Scope tab to find out about the type of papers that the journal accepts.
Some questions you might wish to consider are:

• Does the journal have an international audience?
• Is the journal peer reviewed?
• Who is the editor?
• Who is on the editorial board?
• Which authors publish in the journal?
• Is the journal available online?
• Is the journal published by an international association or learned society?

What advice can you provide to authors preparing to submit to a T&F journal?
It is essential that you submit a paper that is well-written and with clear English. It is also vital that you prepare your manuscript according to the journal’s format and style specifications. Please read through the Instructions for Authors carefully before preparing your manuscript for submission.
Citation rates are important to authors because they’re often used in research funding and promotion decisions, what advice can you provide on optimizing an article for citations?

• Target journals in rapidly growing research fields because they tend to publish papers with a short time interval from submission to acceptance.
• Write a review. Reviews are more likely to be cited than original research papers.
• Publish a straightforward paper on cutting-edge research or a “hot” topic.
• Choose an effective title.
• Make sure that relevant terms are included in the abstract.
• Choose keywords carefully to make sure your article will be found.
• Share your data (e.g. sample attributes, clinical factors, patient outcomes, DNA sequences) where possible.
• Let your Taylor & Francis contact know about upcoming or recent articles that may be of interest to media organizations.
• Think about making your article open access where available.
• Use blogs and podcasts to leverage on-going researcher discussion on the Internet.
• Register on CiteULike and Connotea.
• Present a working paper at a conference
• Review papers for journals.
• Join an editorial board.
• Publish in a special issue with a prestigious guest editor.
• Publish with other authors.
• Put your article in an institutional or subject repository.
• Publicize yourself – link to your latest article in your email signature.
• Make sure that you get help if you are not writing in your first language.

Be aware that...

• Not all research is published and cited in the citation databases mentioned above; for example, conference proceedings are often poorly covered.
• Some types of articles — for example, editorials, letters to editors, news items, meeting abstracts, and case studies — are generally poorly cited.
• The number of times a work has been cited should not be used to gauge the quality of the work; it really only measures the interests of other researchers in the work.
• Citation bias may exist, for example, English-language resources may be favored.
• Citation levels differ widely between research fields and even within a specific field. Basic research tends to be more highly cited than related applied research.
• Your rate of self-citation and citations among the members of a research group may be scrutinized. We do not endorse irrelevant self-citing as such endeavors go beyond the boundaries of securing high-quality content, optimizing engagement with the research community, and general good practice.

Also, Taylor & Francis has a neat feature that if an article published on informaworldTM cites your article, we can tell you about it – you can sign up for a citation alert for your article simply by locating your article and selecting the Alert link in the top right-hand corner of the abstract page.
Taylor & Francis overview

• 580 T&F journals are now listed in or have been accepted for listing in the Thomson Scientific (ISI) Citation Indexes. Over 500 of these were ranked in the 2006 Science and Social Sciences Journal Citation Reports® (JCRs®).
• T&F has 73 journals ranked in the top 10 of their JCR category, with top ranked journals including The American Journal of Bioethics, Applied Spectroscopy Reviews, Human-Computer Interaction, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences, Journal of the Learning Sciences, International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, and Ethnicity & Health.
• T&F has a fully electronic workflow for articles. Some journals have online submission and peer review through Manuscript CentralTM.
• Articles are published online through informaworldTM.