Trail Pack: Author Guidance as Editorial Infrastructure: What We Knew, What Has Changed, and Why This Still Matters

Leslie H. Nicoll, Marilyn Oermann, Peggy L. Chinn, Jamie L. Conklin

Writer’s Camp Counselors

---

Welcome to our monthly Trail Pack! This month we have two research studies, plus an original article, and video interview with Marilyn Oermann, hosted by our Writer’s Camp Counselors, Melissa Anne DuBois and Jamie Bourgeois. If you are new to Trail Packs, they are multi-faceted learning experiences bringing together original research, a podcast/video, and a concise article written exclusively for Writer’s Camp that summarizes the study and highlights its key insights. Begin with the short article, and when your curiosity is sparked, follow the trail to the full research report. The accompanying podcast/video offers a personal touch and shares the story behind how the study developed plus implications for writing and publishing. If you would like to receive 2 contact hours for reading and listening, you can! Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page for details. I hope you find this format both engaging and valuable. I would love to hear your feedback; please share in the comments below. — Leslie H. Nicoll, Camp Director

---

---

---

---

Introduction: The Invisible Work of Publishing

Instructions for authors are among the most familiar—and least examined—features of scholarly publishing. Every journal has them. Every author must navigate them. Yet they often function as background noise: assumed rather than interrogated, complied with rather than designed.

Author guidelines are frequently treated as administrative necessities or compliance documents, separate from the intellectual and relational work of editing. But in practice, they are a form of editorial infrastructure.¹ They shape how authors understand a journal’s expectations, values, and priorities. They influence who feels confident submitting, who struggles to interpret requirements, and who is quietly filtered out along the way.

Seen through this lens, author guidance is not neutral. It encodes assumptions about expertise, responsibility, and access and plays a central role in the author experience, long before peer review begins.

What We Knew in 2018

In 2018, our two studies^2,3 examined how nursing journals communicate expectations to authors, offering insights that remain instructive today.

Oermann and colleagues² evaluated the quality and completeness of instructions for authors across a large sample of nursing journals. We found substantial variability in how journals described peer review processes, ethical requirements, reporting guidelines, and manuscript preparation. Many journals provided incomplete or ambiguous guidance, leaving authors to infer expectations or seek clarification elsewhere.

In a companion study,³ we focused specifically on guidance related to citing and formatting references. Despite the widespread use of standardized styles such as APA and AMA, journals differed considerably in the level of detail and clarity they provided. Authors were often held responsible for reference accuracy without receiving clear, consistent instructions to support that responsibility.

Together, these studies highlighted a persistent pattern: journals relied heavily on authors’ interpretive labor to navigate fragmented or uneven guidance. Author instructions existed, but they did not always function as effective tools for learning, preparation, or quality improvement.

What Has Changed Since 2018

Since these studies were published, the landscape of scholarly publishing in nursing has continued to evolve. Author guidelines are now longer, more detailed, and more densely populated with links than they were even a few years ago. Journal instructions increasingly reference reporting guidelines, data-sharing expectations, open-access policies, ORCiD identifiers, and statements on the use of artificial intelligence. On the surface, this expansion suggests progress: more transparency, more accountability, more support.

Yet for many authors, the experience of navigating journal instructions has not necessarily become easier.

What has changed most visibly is volume, not usability. Instructions for authors often read as accumulations of requirements rather than coherent guides. Policies are added, but rarely integrated. Links proliferate, but their relevance is not always clear. Authors are asked to comply with an expanding set of expectations without corresponding guidance on how those expectations fit together or why they matter.

Technological tools have also advanced. Reference management software has advanced alongside increasingly standardized citation metadata. Online-first publication is now routine. Artificial intelligence has become part of the writing ecosystem, with implications for efficiency as well as error and uncertainty. Yet these developments have not resolved the underlying issues we identified in 2018. Authors still struggle to understand responsibility for reference accuracy, interpret inconsistent formatting instructions, and reconcile journal-specific requirements with broader disciplinary standards.

For authors, this shift can be difficult to discern but consequential in practice. Even in 2018, many journals relied on publisher-developed templates for instructions for authors. Since then, these approaches have become increasingly standardized across publisher journal portfolios. Author guidance is often created and maintained at the publisher level to promote consistency, with limited opportunity for journal-level customization. As a result, instructions for authors may read as generic, overly comprehensive, or misaligned with a journal’s specific scope or editorial practices—not because editors are inattentive, but because the guidance itself is designed to serve multiple journals simultaneously. What appears to authors as inconsistency or opacity at the journal level often reflects structural decisions made elsewhere in the publishing system.¹

Why This Still Matters

Revisiting this work now is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is an opportunity to reconsider how author guidance functions within the larger publishing system.

Author guidelines are often the first sustained interaction an author has with a journal. In an environment where scholarly reading is increasingly article-centered rather than journal-centered, authors may know a journal only through its instructions—long before, or even without, any broader sense of its editorial identity. In this context, guidance does more than communicate requirements; it stands in for editorial voice.

When author guidelines are clear, coherent, and intentionally designed, they can serve a mentoring function—supporting learning, reducing uncertainty, and signaling editorial values. When they are fragmented or opaque, they shift cognitive and emotional labor onto authors, amplifying stress and inequity.

What Editors Can Do: Treating Author Guidance as Editorial Work

Recognizing author guidance as editorial infrastructure also opens space for intentional action. Even within the constraints of publisher-standardized templates, editors retain meaningful opportunities to shape how guidance functions for their journal and its authors.

One starting point is regular editorial review of instructions for authors. Rather than treating author guidelines as static or inherited documents, editors can revisit them periodically—beginning with an editorial assessment and, where appropriate, working with the publisher to update or clarify content. This review need not challenge publisher requirements, but it can identify where reordering, emphasis, or explanation would better support authors. In this way, instructions for authors can serve both the publisher’s need for consistency and the editor’s role as guide.

Another opportunity exists in interpretation. Policies are often written at a level of abstraction that assumes familiarity with publishing norms. Where possible, editors can supplement required language with brief explanations or examples that show what policies mean in practice. Even small additions, such as explaining how a reporting guideline is applied or what a data-sharing statement typically includes, can reduce uncertainty and support learning.

Finally, instructions for authors can be developed as a voice for the journal, not merely a container for requirements. Over time, many editors come to see author guidelines as a kind of sample text: an early signal of how the journal communicates, what it values, and how it engages with authors. Speaking directly to prospective authors, using clear and welcoming language, can help align even publisher-managed components with the journal’s scope and identity.

In an increasingly article-centered scholarly environment, instructions for authors remain one of the few places where guidance has the potential to orient and support authors writing for publication within a specific editorial context. Approached intentionally, they can do more than enforce compliance; they can mentor, orient, and invite.

Conclusion

It is reasonable to ask whether studies published in 2018 still have practical value in 2026. In fast-moving areas of scholarly publishing, age can be mistaken for irrelevance. However, the usefulness of these studies lies not in their timeliness, but in what they help us see.

These articles document patterns that have not disappeared, even as publishing practices have evolved. They provide a clear snapshot of how author guidance functioned at a moment when expectations were already expanding and responsibility was shifting toward authors. Reading them now allows editors and authors to distinguish between what is genuinely new and what has simply intensified.

For editors, revisiting this work offers a way to reflect on constraints that may feel personal but are often structural. For authors, it validates that confusion is not a personal failure but a predictable outcome of how guidance is produced and maintained.

Read today, the value of this work is not in what it predicts, but in what it reveals. It helps us ask better questions about clarity, responsibility, and care—and about how small, intentional changes in guidance can meaningfully improve the scholarly writing experience.

References

1. Nicoll LH. How journals work: a systems-based framework for understanding scholarly publishing. The Writer’s Camp Journal, 2025;2(1):4. doi:10.5281/zenodo.18037409
2. Oermann MH, Nicoll LH, Chinn PL, Conklin JL, McCarty M, Amarasekara S. Quality of author guidelines in nursing journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 2018;50(3):1-8. doi:10.1111/jnu.12383
3. Nicoll LH, Oermann MH, Chinn PL, Conklin JL, Amarasekara S, McCarty M. Guidance provided to authors on citing and formatting references in nursing journals. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development. 2018;34(2):54-59. doi:10.1097/NND.0000000000000430

Authors: Leslie H. Nicoll, Marilyn Oermann, Peggy L. Chinn, Jamie Conklin

Reviewed and Edited by: Roger Watson and Leslie Nicoll

Copyright © 2026 Writer’s Camp and the authors. CC-BY-ND 4.0

Citation: Nicoll LH, Oermann M, Chinn PL, Conklin JL. Author guidance as editorial infrastructure: what we knew, what has changed, and why this still matters. The Writer’s Camp Journal, 2(1):17 doi:10.5281/zenodo.18776278

AI Use Disclosure: Artificial intelligence tools were used for brainstorming and early drafting of the article. The authors retain full responsibility for the content.