Tips of publishing on JPAM or other top international academic journals:
(1). Publishing is teamwork. DON’T try to single hand it. Work with somebody regularly.
(2). Feedback is your best friend. Value the critical suggestions and recommendations from your co-workers, students and so forth, and use them to fix your paper.
(3). Think globally. Find the research topic, which reflects the big trend worldwide, and keep updated.
(4). Explain your contribution. Speak the contribution directly.
(5). Get to the point. This is particularly true for American journals. Editors won’t have that much time reading your paper and you should make it easy for the readers.
(6). Know your journal. Each journal has different topic concentration.
(7). Cite the authors published in the journal on your topic.
(8). Be understandable. Say it as clearly as possible. Write in English and find co-authors who know the language well.
(9). Design, design and design. Pick the topic carefully.
(10). Journals like JPAM values random control trials more and more.
When you receive replied from editors like… it means…
(1). Desk rejection: your paper doesn’t fit the concentration of the journal or it is a bad research.
(2). Rejection: try again, again and again, either to revise the paper or to find another journal.
(3). Revise & Resubmit: follow the revising suggestions and revise. It means a door has been opened.
(4). Conditional acceptance: very few of conditional acceptance get rejected at last.
(5). Acceptance: congratulations!
Internal Validity vs. External Validity: Where Are Policy Analysts Going?
The first level of research: we use specific units as sample. After certain treatments to the samples we get outcomes. The research happens in a specific setting with specific timing. We call this “internal validity”. The second level requires us to extend the conclusions drawn from sampling researches to a larger population. At the same time, internal validity is changing towards external validity. The third level, which is also called “mega-analysis”, extends the conclusion to an even larger population. The extension could be achieved thanks to the fact that we are able to obtain a massive amount of information in this “big data” era. However, the extension requires that different levels of researches have the same assumptions. And it has a high demanding for generalization ability. Can we really do the mega-analysis? It seems it’s hard to execute on a large scale. Therefore, the focus of policy analysis and public management research should still be on internal validity in the next decade or even more.
