There are certain issues you always should consider before you submit an article for publication. Here is a checklist that may be helpful to you.

■ Are all authorship issues resolved?

There are many situations in academia you do not want to be in. Certainly one is a public authorship dispute. You need to make sure, before you submit an article for publication, that all authorship issues are taken care of. Who will be an author and in what order will the authors be placed? If you have a dispute you cannot resolve yourselves, often the chair of a department, the office of the vice president for research, or the office of the appropriate dean can be helpful in mediating the authorship dispute.

■ Is the paper appropriate for the journal?

The easiest thing you can do to increase your chances of an article's being accepted is to ensure that the journal to which you send the article is appropriate. Bob is currently editor of a psychological journal and has edited other journals in the past. He is amazed by the number of submissions that are downright inappropriate for the journal. He does not even send these submissions out for external review. He “desk-rejects” them. By submitting to the wrong journal, the author has wasted his or her own time and the time of the editor, as well as, potentially, external referees. If a journal only accepts empirical articles, don't send a theoretical article with no data. Or if the journal only accepts articles in the field of cognition, don't send an article in the field of clinical psychology. Simply reading the journal's mission statement, as well as looking at articles recently published, can give you an idea of what kinds of articles a particular journal publishes.

■ Did you proofread?

The second easiest thing you can do to increase the chances of an article's being accepted by a journal is to proofread the article. Referees get annoyed when they receive to review articles that have not been proofread. After all, referees typically are not paid anything to review, and they often feel, rightfully, that authors who submit articles with multiple typographical or other easily correctible errors are not respectful of the referees’ time. Therefore, proofread before you send out your article.