Getting research published internationally in English: An ethnographic account of a team of Finance Spanish scholars’ struggles

Intercultural text-based research has shown remarkable differences in the rhetorical structure and devices of research articles (RAs) in different linguistic/cultural contexts of publication, including the Spanish local context and the English international context. However, not much attention has been paid to the research article (RA) writing process, which can throw light into the publication practices of second language (L2) scholars in particular disciplinary fields and which can help unveil their main writing difficulties. In this paper I focus on the “text histories” of a team of Spanish researchers in the field of Finance who struggle to get their research articles published internationally in English. These text histories correspond to 24 papers drafted and (re)submitted over the past 5-6 years. The analysis focuses on the extent to which they aim to publish their RAs in English, how they cope with writing their texts in English, their success in such a task and the kind of negative comments included in the referee reports they receive. Results show that this team of L2 scholars almost exclusively write their RAs in English and aim at publishing them in English-medium international journals; for this demanding task, they draw on a number of strategies. They are partially successful in that they have managed to publish half of their RAs in the first site where they were submitted. Their manuscripts received a lot of negative comments; especially relevant is the inclusion of a high number of unspecific negative comments related to language or style in major revision reports. Looking into the writing process can be of great help to provide L2 scholars with useful guidelines on drafting their RAs in English for international publication and to gain an insight into the forces driving international publication in this context