At some point during your time in the SJSU iSchool, you will probably finish an assignment, submit it to Canvas, receive your grade, and never look at it again.

For many assignments, that makes sense. They were written to demonstrate that you understood a particular concept or could complete a particular task. But other assignments represent weeks, or sometimes an entire semester, of research and writing. You may have reviewed the literature, developed an argument, collected data, evaluated a program, or examined an issue that matters to the library and information science profession.

Those papers do not have to end when the class does.

One of the purposes of the Student Research Journal (SRJ) is to give graduate students an opportunity to participate in scholarly publishing. For many students, publishing in a journal can seem like something that happens much later in an academic or professional career. However, graduate coursework already asks students to do many of the things that researchers and authors do: identify problems, engage with existing scholarship, analyze evidence, and communicate an argument to a reader.

The difference is that a course paper and a journal article are written for different purposes. A course paper is normally written for an audience of one: your professor. Your professor knows the project, knows what readings were assigned, and knows what concepts you were expected to demonstrate. A journal reader does not have any of that context. A journal article has to explain why the topic matters beyond the classroom and how it contributes to a larger professional or scholarly conversation.

That means publishing your coursework usually involves more than removing the course number from the first page and fixing a few APA citations.

Sometimes substantial revision is necessary.

That should not discourage you. One advantage of beginning with coursework is that you are not beginning with a blank page. You may already have a research question, a literature review, an argument, data, or a set of sources. The next step is figuring out what is worth keeping, what needs to be expanded, and what was included only because the assignment required it.

What is the benefit?

Publication gives your work a life beyond the course in which you created it.

The research you completed for an assignment may address a problem that other librarians, archivists, information professionals, or researchers are also thinking about. Publishing allows that work to become part of the professional conversation rather than remaining something exchanged only between you and your instructor.

There is also value in learning how scholarly publishing works. Submitting an article introduces you to editorial review, peer review, revision, and scholarly communication as an author. Receiving critical feedback on something you spent weeks writing can be uncomfortable, but learning how to respond to that feedback is an important part of becoming a stronger writer and researcher. Revision after peer review is not simply correcting mistakes. Often, reviewers are asking an author to clarify an idea, support an argument more fully, reconsider an assumption, or explain something that made perfect sense in the context of a class but is not yet clear to an outside reader.

Students interested in research, doctoral study, academic librarianship, teaching, or other positions where scholarship is valued can also begin building a record of scholarly work through publication. Publication is useful even if you are not planning an academic career. Practitioners have knowledge worth sharing as well. Some of the most useful research begins with questions that emerge from professional practice.

Start by looking at what you have already written. You do not need to decide today that your 25-page research paper is destined for publication.

Instead, go back through some of your previous coursework. Look for the assignments that you continued thinking about after the class ended. Look for papers where the research led you to another question. Look for projects where you found yourself thinking, “Someone should really study this more.” You might also return to an assignment where your professor wrote that an idea was particularly interesting or suggested that you expand part of the paper.

Those are good places to begin. Not every assignment should become an article, and not every strong course paper will fit the Student Research Journal. Coursework might instead provide the foundation for a research manuscript, an evidence summary, or even a book review. Part of the process is determining what you actually have before deciding what it might become.

Throughout this series, we will work through that process. We will look at the types of work SRJ publishes, the differences between course assignments and publishable manuscripts, literature reviews, arguments, structure, abstracts, APA style, book reviews, evidence summaries, peer review, and the revision process.