Eight step guide: how to get published
in JVET
JVET receives around 300 submissions every year, of which we will publish around 40. The vast majority of the remainder are rejected before the peer review process – either as they do not fall within the scope of the journal or because they are insufficiently rigorous to meet our standards of scholarship.
The purpose of this guide is to provide potential authors with some insight into our initial evaluation of the submissions we receive. This will help you to assess whether this is the right journal for you and to improve the chance of your paper being accepted. It is structured around eight questions that the editors tend to ask themselves when a new submission arrives:
1. Have you read the journal’s ‘aims and scope’ page? This should be the starting point for any author who is considering submitting a paper to the journal. It lays out in some detail the types of paper that we do and do not accept. If your paper does not fit within our scope, you should probably reconsider your submission – either by amending your paper or looking to another journal. Check here.
2. Does your paper offer a critical perspective? We are interested in submissions that focus on the more problematic and contested elements of vocational education and training (or technical and vocational education and training – or TVET), typically through a supporting theorisation. These elements might include, for example, challenging tacit assumptions, examining power relationships, detailing student inequalities, contrasting philosophical positionings, contesting curricula, exploring the impact of marketisation, identifying intercultural differences, charting epistemic traditions, assumptions, shifts and challenges and so on. One way, perhaps, of thinking about this is that we tend to accept papers that engage with problems rather than those which offer solutions. Please remember that very specific recommendations belong in reports for government or institutions, not in scholarly articles. It is fine to discuss broad implications and how these might relate to recommendations but please do so at a high level.
3. Does your paper engage sufficiently with vocational education? The journal is concerned mainly with vocational education broadly, including vocational education, technical and vocational education, higher vocational education, school-based vocational education, occupational education, technical education but not professional education. We take a broad view about what we mean by vocational education, including, for example, articles that relate vocational education to curriculum design, pedagogic strategies and practices such as peer-to-peer learning, online delivery, assessment methods, feedback practices and so on. We also include articles about apprenticeships, internships and work-integrated learning, comparative studies of different vocational education systems, and articles that problematise system design of (vocational) education, vocational education policy, preparation of vocational education teachers, and pathways through and to vocational education and other forms of education and the labour market. We currently receive many submissions that have little or no connection to vocational education and training and these papers that don’t have clear engagement with vocational education and training are rejected at the desk review stage.
4. Is your paper of sufficiently broad appeal? We have an international readership that has a broad-based interest in vocational education. We are very happy to accept papers that are rooted in an institutional, disciplinary or national context, provided that they are also able to demonstrate their wider relevance. However, many submissions we receive are very specifically focused on a narrow context and do not indicate how the paper can inform understanding beyond that context. We tend not to publish these. Some submissions fail to address our international audience, for example, by not explaining the national context in which they are based or by over-relying on unexplained jargon and terminology. Please always avoid the use of acronyms that are not in common use internationally, and do not create your own acronyms!
5. Have you drawn on previous articles from the journal? As a general rule, it is a good idea to seek to publish your article in the journals that you cite because this means that your article is relevant to the key concerns of that journal. Successful papers are typically ones from authors who relate topics and argument to articles in JVET that dealt with similar issues. Some strategies include building on previous articles in the journal on that topic or a related topic. You might of course point to the absence of discussion of a particular issue in the journal and argue that it needs to be addressed. However, please take the time to ensure that there is in fact a gap on that particular topic in the journal. We don’t evaluate submissions on the basis of which journals are cited – this is a question for the author alone about whether this is the right journal for them. We therefore recommend that you look back through the journal to get an idea of the articles you might engage with before making your submission. It signals to the editors that you have engaged with the literature in the journal. If this is not the case, you should consider publishing in the journals that you cite as this may well show that your article is more relevant to an alternative journal’s concerns.
6. If your paper is quantitative, is it critical, accessible and rigorous? We welcome quantitative submissions to the journal, provided that they are consistent with the journal’s core values. In particular, we would expect any quantitative submission to take a critical approach – for example, reflecting carefully on the limitations of the data collected and any underpinning assumptions or inherent biases. In addition, as our readership is very diverse, quantitative papers need to be well-explained for a non-specialist audience, particularly in terms of the analytical framework and the inferences drawn from the analysis. Finally, we expect quantitative submissions to be rigorous, both in conception and analysis. We generally do not, for example, publish reports of large-scale descriptive surveys.
7. Is your paper too closely focused on practice? As outlined above, we include submissions that engage with the practice of vocational education and training and the experiences of those engaged in those practices. However, we are not a ‘vocational practice’ journal – i.e. our aim is not to capture ideas about the ‘best’ methods of vocational education and training, but rather to theorise and critique the underpinning structures, cultures, relationships and dynamics that frame and constrain vocational education and training, which includes its teaching and learning. As such, we neither generally publish descriptions of new teaching approaches nor the results of small-scale evaluations, especially where they are not connected to wider debates about vocational education.
8. Have you made life as easy as possible for the editors and reviewers to do their job? It is a tremendous help if your paper is as readable as possible. We recognise the challenges faced by those who are writing in English where this is not their first language. We encourage you to find someone to thoroughly go over your article to proof it for academic English. Please check academic conventions in terms of referencing and structuring your paper so it has all the required components in the depth that is required. There are a number of free resources that are helpful for authors who are based in low and middle income countries:
Taylor and Francis, the publisher of our journal, provides free access for 30 days to its journals free for authors from low and middle income countries https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/star/
AuthorAid provides support to authors from low- and middle-income countries - http://www.authoraid.info/en/
Please also look on the JVET website for occasional workshop events to support writing for publication.
We hope that these questions and answers are useful to you – we are obviously reliant on our authors submitting high-quality content that engages our readership and we are always grateful for all the work and time that goes into preparing those submissions. Hopefully this guidance will help you improve your chances of acceptance through understanding a little more about how we make decisions.
With acknowledgement and huge thanks to the Executive Editors of the Taylor and Francis journal, Teaching in Higher Education, for the inspiration for this article! We’ve based our article on one that they produced, and added to and changed some aspects of their article to tailor it for JVET.
Visit Journal of Vocational Education and Training (JVET) here
Book reviews in JVET
There are of three types of book review that JVET publishes.
1. A standard review will normally be between 500-700 words. We aim to publish reviews that are critical and that engage with the text so that readers will gain a sense of what the book is about and its potential readership. The review will also open-up a scholarly and respectful dialogue. The book may have particular strengths or weaknesses, but it may also pose a number of interesting questions the reviewer would like to raise that could push the debate further.
2. A book review article will be between 1500– 2000 words and will incorporate elements of a standard review but will push the evaluative dialogue much further. It is anticipated that it will set the text more firmly within a particular literature, considering its broader significance and the manner in which it has moved the substantive/theoretical debate further.
3. A review symposium will involve three or four reviewers who independently examine a particular text that is deemed of importance to the field.