Skip to Main Content

Publishing Plan Toolkit

Develping your publishing plan

The Publishing Plan template is the entry point to the Toolkit. It is intended to be used in conjunction with this Toolkit to provide further context. Aim to complete it before you start writing your research. Alternatively, if you have written your manuscript, use it to validate your choice of publishing venue. By developing a publishing plan, you can proactively manage requirements and expectations during your publishing journey.

This Publishing Plan template is aimed at helping WSU authors maximise their research impact and engagement. This resource outlines a strategic approach to developing a publishing plan that helps you find suitable, high-quality resources to maximise your research impact and engagement, outlines how to submit your research, self-promote your work, and how to utilise metrics to support your career.

The Publishing Plan template provides guidance on:

  • How to find and submit research to suitable, high-quality publishing outlets,
  • How to self-promote your research at different stages of the project and
  • For researchers, how to track your research performance.
How to use the Publishing Plan template

The Publishing Plan template provided by the Library is designed to help you collect and order your thoughts into a comprehensive publishing plan. These factors will inform your decision on where to publish, how, when, and where to self-promote your work, and how to track research performance for grant and academic performance applications.

Document your responses so you can refer to the publishing plan as you work through your research project.

For further context, ensure you are connected to the Internet, then click the links alongside each ‘question’, e.g., A1, A2, etc., to be redirected to more information.

To start this process, you will need the following details:

  • A solid research question/title for your research. An abstract would also help you find a suitable journal/publisher.
  • Your publishing timeframe, i.e., when do you need to publish your work?
  • Your school publishing targets. If you are unsure what these are, ask your supervisor/principal supervisor for your School Work Plan Policy Research Intellectual Contributions (research outputs and impacts)’, e.g., to publish in a journal with SCImago or JCR rank of Q1 or Q2.
  • An ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). This is your unique researcher identifier. Ensure you have set up your ORCID record.
  • Your Field of Research (FoR) codes for your research project. This will help you search for suitable publishing outlets by keyword or subject.
  • Whether this will be a collaborative effort (find authors from WSU to partner with, or use SciVal (institutional login required) to find authors that have written most papers/highly cited in your research topic or discipline).

Elsevier also provides Author tools & resources to help you get published.

© Western Sydney University, unless otherwise attributed.
Library guide created by Western Sydney University Library staff is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY)