Publishing opportunities in academic writing are usually going to be in journals. There are a couple of different approaches to this. The first is to get together a list of journals that either cover or might cover your topic. Usually, a good starting point would be the same journals that were used in the literature review. There are other journals that might be possible publishing candidates as well, so further supplemental research should be conducted, again looking for articles that cover the same subject. The journal search can also be supplemented with an Internet search. There are resources available to help inform you about your publishing options. This book is available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Journal-Article-Twelve-Weeks/dp/141295701X and there are numerous articles that can be found with a Google search on the subject. Good (2013) recommends that the academic advisor can lend some insight, and may even have contacts with journal editors and publishers to help you get your foot in the proverbial door. Further advice is to ensure that your article fits with what the journal has been publishing recently (Klingner, Scanlon & Pressley, 2005). So the first part is basically getting a list of potential journals together, the second step is to vet them and the third step is to see if you have an "in" with any of the ones you have on your short list. Scholarly journals are the best for publication. These are peer-reviewed journals. Peer review is pretty much the main criteria for a scholarly publication, because the peer review process puts your writing before the eyes of other academics in the field before it is published. This might result in the rejection of your work, but rejection of the work is just another step in the process. A lot of good work is rejected the first time. Maybe it would be better if you are not turned down for publication, but if you receive good feedback as part of being turned down that helps you to improve your research, that is perfectly fine and acceptable.

Part II. Credible sources have a positive impact on your resources, while a lack of credible sources will reduce the effectiveness of the resource. This is why when using anything other than academic journals or primary sources (like government-issued economic data, for example) there is a risk of damaging the research. Research that is not credible can be biased, conceptually-flawed, methodologically-flawed or contain other problems. Indeed, even academic research can have these problems, so non-academic sources can be especially problematic. It is important to remember that an academic is contributing to the academic discussion of a subject, to the lay discussion of the subject. Thus, the contributions should be based on a fundamental understanding of the academic discourse, not discourse that is not already accepted in the academic study of the subject matter. Quality can only be built on a foundation of quality.

The process of creating the annotated bibliography begins with identifying papers that are relevant to your thesis. These can provide rough background information or they could be specific antecedents to your work. In either case, the annotated bibliography will be something that is built over time. The notes are first and foremost for you as researcher to understand and codify the relevant information. If there is a need for submission of a formal annotated bibliography, that is another step altogether, but as a researcher this is for you to understand what the relevant material is prior to writing the literature review. The notes in the annotated bibliography will allow you to quickly recall the right paper when you realize you want to reference something. Fink (2010) notes that research is useful for everything from refining the research question to applying for funding and for evaluating the data that has been gathered on the subject before. All of these things will help you to become expert on the subject, so it helps to have a formalized process for creating an annotated bibliography, not only to get the citation information correct but to be able to understand and express succinctly the salient points about each article.

As a new academic, your research is going to be on a subject that has probably been covered before. It is risky to undertake research in a new area prior to establishing credibility -- remember that your work will need to be accepted by your peers before it gains credibility. The way I see this is that working with established research threads, while adding to them, is the best way...

This immediately points towards the use of credible sources. If you want to be taken seriously as an academic, then you need to take your role as academic seriously. I feel that using inappropriate sources is something not normally tolerated in academia, and that anybody pursuing a career in academia needs to respect the norms of the business. Those norms have evolved over time as a means of quality control in academic research. When one becomes more experienced, that may be the time to introduce new ideas, but when one is inexperienced, it is best to learn from the mistakes of others, and follow the industry best practices. That means using only credible sources in your research. Failure to do so will probably mean that your reputation as an academic will suffer and your papers are not going to be published.
Your credibility as a scholar is tied to a lot of things, but the use of credible sources is one of them. Scholars need to be able to think critically, and part of that is being able to evaluate sources, to recognize good ones from bad ones. A scholar should be able to make a qualitative evaluation about the quality of sources within credible academic journals, much less be able to distinguish between the quality level of non-journal sources. The choice of research sources reflects on one's ability to research, reason and to think critically, all of which are valued skills in academia. Thus, the depth, breadth and quality of your sources very much reflects on your abilities as an academic, because it is a proxy for these key skills that are required of all academics.

At this stage, I am a new academic and my focus is on my thesis. To build credibility requires demonstrating the key skills of academics -- research, reasoning, thinking critically, crafting and defending arguments. In some fields, rhetorical sophistication is utilized to project credibility, so writing skills count (Hyland, 2011). In other fields, it may be mathematical sophistication -- the ability to create and utilize complex models may project academic credibility. There have even been studies that seek to define credibility, for example in the alleged debate about climate change (Anderegg, Prall, Harold & Schneider, 2010), which unsurprisingly ends up being a debate between researchers who are credible and pundits who are not.

Establishing credibility begins with process. Research must be done according to the best practices of academic research, and from there credibility as an academic will come from my ability to interpret the research, to build on it with credible research of my own and to generally make a positive contribution to the knowledge of the subject matter. Such contributions will be the output of a process that begins with comprehensive research that is well-designed such that it leaves no stones unturned in the quest for information that can help inform your topic. After all, credibility in academia relies on the academic having expert knowledge of a subject and being able to formulate complex critical thought about the subject. A journal article is just one of the end results of a formalized research process, and it helps to establish credibility because it demonstrates that your level of scholarship is sufficient to make a positive contribution to the field of study.

Part III. An annotated bibliography is defined as a "list of sources one has used for researching a topic," wherein the sources have been summarized for content as well as for the reference (Purdue OWL, 2014). The annotated bibliography is important as an organizational tool in the research process. The research process can take months, and the annotated bibliography is a formalized way of keeping track of your research. It allows you to quickly reference what has been researched, perhaps using keywords, though their use in an annotated bibliography is not universal -- if you're using Word keywords are a great way to help you navigate through what could be a hundred sources. So the annotated bibliography serves a few different purposes. The bibliography part catalogs the different sources that were used, and the annotations help with understanding exactly the contribution that each source made to the research.

The role that the annotated bibliography will play in the dissertation is that it will form the basis of the research, and the structure of the annotated bibliography will allow for easier movement back and forth from the research to the literature review and ultimately the paper. The process…