If you are an ambitious research student or researcher, then there definitely comes a stage in your academic life where you want to get your work published in a reputed journal. However, you may have several types of queries regarding the choice of a suitable journal to which you could submit your research paper. Check out here a few considerations that can make you select the right journal for paper publishing.

Find its impact factor value

The range of readership of a journal or its popularity is generally determined by its impact factor value. Thus, you should check this value for your shortlisted journals before making a final choice. If your chosen journal has high impact factor and offers an open access to all online readers, then it may be the right selection.

Look at its audience

Every journal caters to a different audience in specific academic fields. See whether the audience of your chosen journals matches your publishing purpose. If the audience of a journal is your target audience too, then you can easily pick it up.

Determine its space

It is also important to know whether your selected journal covers your subject area and has a wide reach to your target readers. You can only reach such readers if a journal offers space to your type of research studies. For instance, you may be doing a case study while your chosen journal may not like to cover many case studies. In such a case, there occurs a mismatch leading to higher chances of rejection. Thus, make sure to select a journal that keeps your study high on its priority.

Consider the time taken for publishing

Everyone wants to get his/her work published as soon as possible. Thus, it is also necessary to check whether your journal has a shorter time cycle to accept and publish studies. Take a decision after thorough consideration of each of your shortlisted journals.

Why would you like to write for journals? What is your purpose behind your doing so? Do you plan to write for a research assessment? Do you wish to develop your profile in a particular area? Would you decide which journal to write for using this information? If you are not sure, then this is how you should write an article for a research journal.

Have a Strategy

Have you seen how other researchers write for a journal? Which conversation or group do you see yourself joining? Some people prefer to keep their articles ready for publication and then look for a place to publish them. However, some people prefer to write later according to the policies of the journal in which they would like to publish their articles. You would need to first work out why you wish to publish your article in a journal and then, write the article. This will help you stay motivated enough to write a journal article.

Analyze Different Writings

Take a few journals in your field of study and then, analyze them. Make sure you scan through all the writings and look very closely at them. Highlight all the sentences that are important to you. Can you see that the writings in the journal are related to one particular genre of writing? Can you define the different types of writing structures simply by looking at them?

Do an Outline

Do you always simply dive in to start writing or do you write a good outline for all your articles before you can begin writing one? Outlining and writing a plan for your research article are highly useful. They will help you define what you need to write and to develop your ideas. Use lots of action verbs in your research article before going ahead to write it fully.

Why is a white paper written? It is written to provide the solution to a problem. There was a time when white papers were typically used for government work. Different government departments had various problems that they needed to tackle at different points of time. They used to appoint commissions and officers to write documents that would provide the answers to all these solutions.

But now white papers are used everywhere. They are used in the IT industry quite a lot especially when a new product has to be introduced to investors and customers. Marketing departments are known for their extensive use of white papers to draw attention to their products and impress upon the outside world the value of what they are selling.

Many white papers are written and they are published on the web. People are always hunting the Internet for information. They want details on a product before they buy it. They want details on an application before they use it. They want details on a service before they subscribe to it. That is why many researchers prepare white papers and then they load it on the Internet. People go online and they read it. Then they make up their minds if they want to subscribe to what the white paper is saying or not.

Students who are working in the Information Technology field should start preparing white papers from a young age and from early on in their academic lives. Once they join the job market, they will find that the demand for white papers is huge. They will find that there is much money to be made in the writing and publishing of white papers. That is why researchers are not complete till they have mastered the art of writing white papers.

As a marketing student you might think that life is all about building relationships and networking. But that is not the case. You need to be prepared for a life that is full of numbers. You need to be as good at statistics as anybody else because you will be spending a lot of your life working with numbers.

There is a lot of statistical analysis in marketing. There are many researchers and surveyors whose sole job it is to gather data, compile them and find patterns in them. Major multinational brands have markets that consist of millions of people of all genders, all age groups and with different kinds of wants and needs. There is no way that a marketing manager can possibly go to each and every individual, find out what they want and design products to cater to them. They need data that splits the vast population into various divisions and slots them into convenient categories.

For this task to be accomplished, the marketing manager would need employees who are skilled with numbers. He would be asking them on a regular basis to make excel spreadsheets full of vast quantities of data, build a database that has massive volumes of information, create graphs and charts and tables, make PowerPoint presentations that explain these vast volumes of data, and prepare reports for the higher management.

Marketers themselves need to be good at reading numbers and understanding the nature of all the numbers. So, along with their networking skills, it is vital for marketing students to become good at numbers as well. In fact, when they are working on their dissertation or post-graduate reports marketing students will be called upon to justify their project with large volumes of data and extensive surveys.

The problem concerning “Don’t know” (DK) responses:

There are times when the researcher comes across few difficult situations to handle like a DK response. This response of DK does not hold much importance till the time it remains small. But when it becomes big, it becomes a matter of concern. The respondent might not actually know the answer or fail in getting the right information.

The best way to deal with DK response is to design correct and more appropriate questions. Even the rapport with respondents can help in minimizing DK responses. There could be times when the DK response has already occurred. What should e done in such a case? An estimate should be made about the allocation of DK answers from other data in the questionnaire. The other could be to keep them as altogether a separate category if DK responses are legal, otherwise the reader can make his own decision.

Another way to minimize DK response is to assume that DK responses can occur more or less randomly and as such could be distributed them among the other answers in the ratio in which the latter may have occurred. The same response could be achieved if all DK responses are excluded from tabulation purpose and that too without inflating the actual and right numbers of other answers.

Research questions are important because:

• Helps in search for literature
• Guides decisions regarding selection of research design
• Assists in what kind of data to be collected and the respective source
• Helps in analysis of data
• How data is to be written is also assisted
• Sets the right direction

A researcher generally works on the area that interest him.  It could be derived from any of the several sources:

Personal experience:  it may depend upon the personal choice of the researcher or some experience that stems from his real life experience which he may want to pen down and share with the readers

Theory: there could be few researchers who might be interested to test features and aspects of labour process theory or situational and contingency theories on organisation structure.

The research literature: interest in the nature of shop-floor work could be stimulated with studies related to research area as Indians working in British industry.

Puzzles: how would individual empowerment and team compatible with each other especially when both of them have been themes in research on quality initiatives.

New developments in organisations: examples of this may include the coming up of internet or diffusion of new models of organisation like TQM, Total Quality Management, call centres and customer service programmes.

Organisational problems: this may include problems of industrial relations or problem in recruitment regarding new management trainees and the respective sources to look for them.

All these types of sources recommend that in research the scholar would often start with a general research area or objectives that again have to be narrowed down in order to develop a more focused approach from which research questions could be generated.

It is easy for many writers on methodological issues to distinguish between quantitative and qualitative research. Few writers consider it as ‘false’; the status being ambiguous as considered by few writers as a fundamental contrast. The understanding of quantitative and qualitative research is important as it represents a crucial means to classify varied methods of business research and because it is helpful for a range of various issue concerned with the working of business research.

On the face of it, quantitative research employs use of measurement and qualitative do not but many writers perceive them as having different epistemological foundations and also different in other regards too.

Quantitative research can be construed as a strategy pertaining to research that puts emphasis on quantification in the process of collecting data and analysing data that is helpful to:

• Entail a deductive approach to the relationship between research and theory, whereby the emphasis is placed on the testing of theories.
• Has taken into consideration the norms of the natural scientific model and more specifically positivism.

On the contrary qualitative research usually concentrates on inductive approach to work on the relationship between research and theory whereby laying emphasis on:

• Basically to generate theories
• Rejects the norms and practices of the natural scientific model and positivism particularly and prefers emphasis on the ways in which people interpret their social world.

By contrasting the two approaches, it is convenient to see them as incompatible; they could be successfully combined within a single project too.

• Before a research is planned a few questions need to be answered like:
• Why should a research be conducted?
• What is its purpose? What is the problem area to be resolved? Or are the opportunities available in the market?
• What alternatives can the researcher find besides and including research?
• Who is the set of recipient using this research and what should be their expectation?
• What should be the area on which research should be conducted? Establish research objectives.
• What set of questions need to be prepared by the research proposal
• What set of hypotheses need to be established?
• Should there be any boundaries or limitations for the study?
• Is the research topic undertaken worth the study?
• What is the value of information and whether its cost be more then the cost of collecting it? Would it be possible also to obtain the information?
• If the benefit is not exceeding the cost that is involved, one should not conduct the study as it is the suitable course of action for all.
• What should be the way to design a research to achieve the set objectives?
• Should it be primary or secondary research?
• Which course of alternative to be chosen?
• Specifying sampling plan
• Designing the experiments.
• Collecting the data.
• Designing and collecting the data.
• How should the data be analysed, interpreted and also used to give recommendations for further action?
• Reporting the research results.
• Providing strategic recommendations.

In India soft drinks perhaps one of the most hard fought categories in all regards be it distribution, communication, media, events, pricing etc. almost every year it maintains a consistent position of being one of the top categories on television whereby making it phenomenally a competitive segment. During the world cup and the festive time in 2007, there was a clear and predictable pattern showing the two specific peaks of ad spend. Aerated drinks are one category which is heavily advertised in movies, music soaps and cricket.

Almost every year the cola companies take on as the official sponsors of World Cup- Cricket, therefore major part of advertisement cost is attributed to this category. The cola giants are also sponsoring other sports as wrestling and soccer. There is 10 per cent of advertising of aerated drinks concentration on music channels, whereas MTV and Channel V scores over other music channels. It is basically in the general interest segment that about 98 percent of advertising of aerated drinks is concentrated which is an interesting insight. On the contrary concentration of only 2 per cent advertising is on film magazines, business, youth, women, in-flight, education and career related magazines.

It is the media spend distribution pattern that is mostly followed by brands in the soft drink category. It is Coke and Pepsi that follow a different pattern. In order to avoid the ‘ad clutter’ or overlap of advertising messages the broad group of targets for the brands can be similar and could be reached through varied combinations of media vehicles. This however does not imply that the marketwise strategy would remain the same for each brand. It could be specific for each brand.