New Class: English 5390 Writing for Publication

Question: What are some of the important professional journals in your field? Which ones would you consider as potential publication venues?

This is actually a difficult question for me to answer because I am not entirely sure of my field. Back when I was a microbiology graduate student, the answers were simple: Science, Nature, Cell, The Journal of Bacteriology, etc. Then, I stopped being a microbiologist, though my brain refuses to forget its training and eventually started being an employee of the American Chemical Society Publications Division, who I am proud to say publish over 40 excellent journals. However, nothing I write would qualify to be published in any of them. So now, though I have a brain long trained as a scientist, I am not a scientist, I am a technical communicator, whose interest lies in how scientists communicate now, how they communicated in the past, and how they will likely communicate in the future, and I have to look at the Technical Communication journals, some of which are Technical Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.

Of which, I must select Technical Communication Quarterly as one target because the Aims & Scope of that particular journal includes scientific communication. However, the journal is only published quarterly. I also cannot tell, as of yet, if one must be a member of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing to submit.

Technical Communication is published by the Society for Technical Communication, which is also published quarterly. This journal does not directly mention scientific communication in its instructions to authors, but it does suggest that manuscripts submitted to the journal must have some practical application, which I am not sure that research into scientific communication does. Those who would benefit from it, the scientists, would likely never read it in a non-scientific journal, so what practical application could it have?

It looks like it may be difficult for me to determine a good target for the kind of work in which I am truly interested (scientific communication); perhaps, I should change my target and look at one of the papers that I wrote for another class as one that could be polished up and published.