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Teaching in Higher Education receives over 500 submissions every year, of which we will publish around 50 (plus our special issues). 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 page 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 seven questions that we tend to ask ourselves 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 (or any other 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.
2. Does your paper offer a critical perspective? The subtitle of the journal is ‘Critical Perspectives’ and this is vitally important to our identity and to the papers that we publish. It is not always easy to communicate what we mean by ‘critical’ in this context, but we are interested in submissions that focus on the more problematic and contested elements of higher education teaching, 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.
3. Does your paper engage sufficiently with teaching? The journal is concerned mainly with the environments, processes and practices of teaching and it is not a general higher education journal. We take a broad view about what we mean by ‘teaching’, including, for example, curriculum design, doctoral supervision and pedagogic strategies and practices such as peer-to-peer learning, online delivery, assessment methods, feedback practices and so on. We currently receive many submissions that have little or no connection to teaching, focusing instead on employment outcomes, university management, student profiling or other features of higher education. Papers without a clear engagement with teaching are rejected.
4. Is your paper of sufficiently broad appeal? We have an international readership that has a broad-based interest in teaching in higher 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 we tend not to publish these. In particular, we receive many papers about (school) teacher training and about teaching English as a foreign language – in both instances, there are specialist journals in these areas and we tend not to accept these submissions unless the paper has a clear relevance to wider debates. Also, 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.
5. Have you drawn on previous articles from the journal? We have a strong commitment to the idea of ongoing conversations being played out within the journal over the course of several years. We are obviously very happy to see new conversations started, but if your submission does not engage with any previous papers in the journal, it may be a signal that you are submitting to the wrong place. 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 conversations you might engage with before making your submission.
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 expect submissions to engage with the practice of teaching and the experiences of those engaged in those practices. However, we are not an ‘academic practice’ journal – i.e. our aim is not to capture ideas about the ‘best’ methods of teaching, but rather to theorise and critique the underpinning structures, cultures, relationships and dynamics that frame and constrain 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 teaching.
We hope that these questions and answers are useful to you – we are obviously reliant on our authors submiting 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.
Teaching in Higher Education 