what's a "letter-sized page" in the US?

[hatwoman]

anyone able to translate this into something useful like number of words: "The maximum length for lead articles is 100 letter-sized pages in 12-point Times New Roman type, with double-spaced text, quotations, and footnotes."?

It's almost but not quite A4. I think if you did the calculation for A4 you'd be just about there

is it that size that's a wee bit bigger than A4?

They have those yellow legal pads which are old foolscap I think - longer and narrower than A4. But I don't know if "letter-sized" means that or something a bit smaller.

Oh, here you go . Very specific!

Wrong again - letter-sized is shorter and wider

I just got 300 words - double spaced 12 point on an A4. this letter-sized can't be too different can it?

Have a look at my link, hatwoman - total area is practically identical.

(Scroll down when you get there)

I saw it janh - isn't it strange what seem people feel compelled to write about - I just about managed to get as far as the representative sizes without falling asleep

tamum - while you're there/here (if you still are) can I hi-jack my own thread? You're an academic yes? If you're totally unpublished and you want to get published do you aim low? do the serious journals just chuck yuor manuscript in the bin if they can't find any citations of you. or do they read the thing and barely take any notice of the name? any hints?

Hi hatwoman, I'm sorry I only just saw this. I would love to be able to help but I'm not sure I am the best person to ask- it's so different in science, you pretty much know from the quality of the experiments where you can aim (is it descriptive, experimental, hot topic etc). Also, you usually start publishing as a PhD student so you are never quite "breaking in" to anything. For what it's worth, no journal editor in my field would bin anything because they couldn't find citations for the authors, but then we would very, very rarely publish as single authors. If I am thinking of writing a review as a single author I would normally contact the editor first with a brief summary and see what they think.

It might be worth starting a new thread actually- EllBell is an academic in a non-science area, and I'm sure there are others. Good luck

tamum and hatwoman - what are your fields?

I'm always amazed by how many scientists there are on mumsnet.

Hatwoman - I agree with tamum comments on publication acceptance. Also in science many (but by no means all) review articles are invited.

I'm in genetics, Dophus, although mainly doing research in cancer cell/molecular biology. Hatwoman is err doing something terribly complicated to do with policy and international relations . What do you do?

pmsl at the idea of what I do being complicated compared with molecular biology. Dophus I'm a bit of a hybrid - I've worked for several years in human rights, just did an LLM (law masters) in international law (for which i was chuffed to bits to get a distinction). So I'm trying to move a wee bit from practice into something a bit more academic - I'd like to tunr my dissertation into something publishable and would like to do a bit of teaching (I'm told that several years work experience, plus teh LLM is quite respectable in my field -- I have no desire to embark on a phd)

Hi hatwoman... just seen this.

I co-edit a journal and we would never just bin something because we hadn't heard of the author. Everything submitted to us is read by the chief editor and at least two other readers/editors (depending on the field). I wouldn't 'aim low', personally. You don't get much credit for publishing in non-referreed journals, so you may as well start from the top. I'd try to identify the journal that 'chimes' best with the sort of work that you do (I'm guessing that there are specialist journals in your area - in Italian Studies there are so few of us that journals tend to be quite wide-ranging, but that's a feature of the subject area) and then write to the editor saying that you'd like to submit an article on xyz and would they be interested. Don't be apologetic about it and don't say that you've not published anything before. Have confidence in the fact that you have something interesting to say. Sorry that I don't have specific expertise in your area, but that's certainly what I'd advise someone working in Italian. Good luck!

thanks Ellbell - that's very useful. I've got a particularly useless lecturer - intelligent guy, obviously, but not a good teacher, gives out useless reading lists with wrong titles and references on it. I asked him and he told me to submit it to a particular journal. I tried the univeristy library - they didn;t hold it, I tried a specialist law library (one of the best places in the UK probably for its subject, they didn;t hold it. the librarian there was able to search elswhere for it - she tried all the London universities, the British Library and then all the UK universities. it doesn't exist! what a vote of confidence!

hatwoman, do you have access to Journal Citation Reports? Let me know if you don't, and if you might find it useful- I an easily look some up for you

thanks tamum - what is journal citation reports? I know all the main journals in the relevant area - unless I ought to be aiming low, in which case maybe I don;t. But I think I'm going to go with ellbell's take on things and see what happens. I can also prioritise by first trying journals that would accept it at its current length - some prefer shorter, which would involve some work.

Good luck with it hatwoman!

Tamum - I'm a behavioural neuroscientist.

hatwoman, it's just the list of impact factors for journals in a given subject area, or searchable by title and so on. It's the holy grail of the RAE . Just let me know.