How to breathe life into unpublished content

Unpublished content is like a toothache that refuses to go away. The content represents hours of investment—with nothing as yet by way of returns. Writing is hard work even for seasoned researchers and academics. They would rather get on with their research than spend their time writing up an account of their research, but write they must. And yet, writing is not enough—the manuscript must be published. No wonder unpublished content is a pain point for researchers. This post suggests some ways of turning that into published material, though not always in the form of a research paper.

Change the target journal. Think why a given piece of writing remains unpublished. Typically, it will be a manuscript, based on original research, that has been rejected by a journal but it may well be a review paper or a chapter you contributed to a proposed multi-authored volume that never saw the light of the day or an article for a magazine aimed at broader readership.

Remember that by the time you have submitted a manuscript to a journal, nearly all your work is already done. Therefore, be persistent: if one journal rejects your manuscript, submit it to another journal—after revising it, including reformatting it for the new journal in consideration. As a rule of thumb, try three journals in succession but make sure that the manuscript is within the scope of each target journal. Revising and reformatting are tedious tasks, but see them as a proportion of total time spent on that research: you will then appreciate them as an investment that promises rich dividends.

A recent study¹ reported that of the 302 manuscripts rejected by the journal to which they had been submitted first, 139 (46%) were published elsewhere. What is even more noteworthy is that 18 of these 139 articles (13%) were published in journals more prestigious than the first choice.

Change the nature of publication. Trade journals and magazines are sources often ignored by researchers but offer a promising alternative to academic journals especially in terms of readership and impact. Go over your unpublished manuscript and see whether the content can be repurposed to emphasize practical applications rather than a contribution to theory. For example, a manuscript about a novel method of treating seawater to make it potable may have been rejected by a journal because the sample size was too small. However, if you are convinced that the method is effective, you can write about the method instead, emphasizing its novelty and other benefits such as lower cost, quicker processing, suitability for large-scale (or small-scale) application, or whatever and send the article to a relevant trade journal.

Change the language. Since you already have the content, see if you can publish a suitably revised version of it in a language other than English: this will win you a totally different set of readers and raise your profile. Explore related content in the target language so that you get some idea of how best to present your content. The channel or medium may be a scientific journal, but more often, a website or a newsletter or a magazine is the more likely channel to publish content in a language other than English.

Change the form of publication. Although you may have aimed the unpublished material at a journal or a magazine, you do not have to be tied to text-based formats. Instead, explore whether you can make a podcast or a video clip based on the material and post it on your personal website/blog, LinkedIn, YouTube or any similar platform, depending on the purpose and audience of the revised content.

Change the scope by broadening it. Once you have decided to explore other avenues for your unpublished material, you can be a bit more adventurous. Consider adding any other unpublished material you may have and see if you can come up with something that covers more than what you initially intended. Add more fresh content if you do not have anything ready to hand but make sure that the finished article is within the word limits suggested by the channel to which you plan to submit the article.

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To sum up, be creative: the unpublished material of today is published material of tomorrow.

Reference

1 Menon V, Jayaprakashan K P, Varadharajan N, Ameen S, Praharaj S K. 2022. Fate of manuscripts rejected by a specialty psychiatry journal: a retrospective cohort study. Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine 44: 493–498