STRUGGLING MOTIVATION OF THREE INDONESIAN NOVICE WRITERS IN SCHOLARLY PUBLICATION

Writing for scholarly publication is commonly perceived as a daunting task in academic writing classes. Myriad studies have been geared to uncover theoretical significance within this process. However, little attention has been addressed in analyzing novice writers’ self-motivation construction in writing for scholarly publication. This present study was designed to investigate how self-motivation of research, writing


Introduction
Research on writing for scholarly publication has been an intriguing topic recently.Studies on this issue have been enacted in many parts of the world.For instance, in several Asian countries such as Vietnam (Pham & Hayden, 2019), Korea (Kim, 2018), China (Mu & Zhang, 2018), scholarly publication research has attracted scholars' attention.Research on scholarly publications has been carried out not only in Asian regions but also in other countries, such as Iran (Karimnia, 2013 North America, and Western Europe (Larson & Larson, 2017).Hence, it can be observed that research on scholarly publication remains prominent.
Several previous works have informed that scholarly publication offers advantages for scholars' careers, improvement of knowledge and deep understanding of various types of research (Earnshaw, 2018), albeit scholarly publication is an on-going challenge (Casanave, 2018) and a daunting work for some of them (Sharifi & Buccheri, 2019).This consistently supports the fact that scholars are required to invest time in scholarly publications, particularly reputable international journals (Shin, 2019).
However, the advantage of the writing publication brings some challenges for the writer, especially for novice writers.Comprising such issues as the level of academic writing (Karimnia, 2013), they do not know how to deal with grammatical structure, paraphrasing, and organizing ideas (Harmawan et al., 2023).They also have limited knowledge of writing for publication (Alimorad, 2018), time constraints and little experience in writing for publication (Cabanas, Bridgeman, & Hermes-DeSantis, 2018), institutional pressure to publish in reputable international journals (Jiang, Borg, & Borg, 2017) and being trapped to publish in predatory journals (Chavarro, Tang, & Ràfols, 2017).The challenge of writing for publication becomes higher because the Indonesian government issues a policy for scholarly publication in higher education.This policy requires researchers, lecturers, and graduate students to publish articles in reputable international journals (Sandy & Shen, 2018).
The writers feel difficult to handle the pressure and follow the process of writing for publication (Isa et al., 2023), and they do not know how to develop their writing ideas (Yeo et al., 2022).In another side, the development of technology opens other challenges in terms of the originality of idea in writing.Most writers try to use some applications to get the idea of writing or revising their writing but they are trapped with plagiarism and cannot maximize their creativity (Dutta et al., 2020).They tend to follow the ideas of applications or the results of search engines (Hosseini et al., 2023).
The existence of artificial intelligence, challenges, pressures, and the long process of writing for publication have a big influence on the motivation of writers (Chan & Hu, 2023).Meanwhile, strong motivation in the writing process is the key to the successful process of the publication.It can be built from the environment and self -regulated process to achieve high motivation in writing for publication.(Nückles et al., 2020).Extensive studies have also delineated that motivation plays a crucial role in successful scholarly publication.
The findings of the numbers of research studies suggested novice writers mostly voice motivation for publication in terms of incentives and awards (Lundwall, 2019), career refinement (Lindahl, 2018), knowledge sharing (Bingham, 2014), and community contribution (Luo & Hyland, 2016) in their journey of getting published internationally.These writers make use of their investment through external motivational factors contributing to their sustained writing, submission, revision, and publishing process (Cotos et al., 2020).
In a similar vein, the motivation domain determines scholars' engagement in the research and publishing process (Zamorski & Bulmer, 2002).During research supervising meetings, for instance, novice writers construct their self-motivation in receiving and revising positive feedback from supervisors (Agricola, van der Schaaf, Prins, & van Tartwijk, 2019).Besides, binary status as non-native English speakers (NNES) and NES student-writers are not inclined with whether they are put in an advantage or a disadvantage condition when dealing with constructive peer-review process in publication since the essential experiences in writing for publication were equally encountered (Shvidko & Atkinson, 2019).This process enables them to engage in sustained motivation in scholarly publications (Williyan et al., 2023).
Understanding how novice writers construct their motivation in the scholarly publication process becomes the focus of this present research.The literature as mentioned above has indicated that this issue is under-explored, particularly in the context of Indonesia.Given the attempts enacted above, several previous studies have also yielded a fact that the low number of scholarly publications in Indonesia is likely due to factors related to the complicated rhetorical styles required by many reputable journals (Arsyad, 2019), lacking facilities to conduct meaningful research (Sandy & Shen, 2019), and low level of academic English writing skills (Hartono, Arjanggi, & Praptawati, 2019).So, the previous work found that most of the writers' motivations are not stable even though they lose their motivation because of those problems (Bailey et al., 2021).
Pre-liminary study was conducted in one month at one university in Indonesia to see the real problem of writing for publication.The result showed that most of the writers had a big deal with their motivation.Sometime, they could pass their days without writing even one sentence only.They were really tired of the long process, and the revision that they have to make.They also often received many rejections for their writing and then decided to stop writing.So, we can come up with the idea that challenges, chances, and pressures have a big line with motivation (Zahrin et al., 2022).
Therefore, this study attempts to uncover how Indonesian novice writers construct their motivation in writing for scholarly publication.It investigates their efforts to get published through the process of writing manuscripts, idea-sharing, and submitting to targeted journals.Despite its extensive investigation, studies examining the motivation of novice writers in scholarly publications are rarely discerned in Indonesian higher education.Thereby, the present study attempts to uncover this issue and capture how novice writers engage themselves in writing for scholarly publication.

Research design
The inner human initiative issues with naturalistic, and holistic dynamic social realities can be explained in detail moreover the result can be not generalized since the study has been done within closed parameters (Muzari et al., 2022).Therefore, this research used a qualitative research design with a descriptive approach.This research design provided detail narration about the motivation construction of novice writers in higher education.

Participants
This study was conducted in the context of Indonesian higher education.Three participants were selected based on these criteria: 1) having few experiences in scholarly publication which means that they do not have any experience in scholarly publication or they have only once to twice experience as the first author in scholarly publication, 2) participating in education nationwide conferences, and 3) joining publication workshops for novice writers in the university.We sent consent form before they were interviewed, and for confidentiality issues, they agreed on our using pseudonym to identify them.One participant, Ningsih (27th years old), is currently taking a doctoral degree in history education at a public university in Central Java.She is also a teacher in one of the junior high schools in Indonesia.She just embarked on writing for publication once she entered a graduate program and now she gets used to publishing many articles in various journals.The second participant, Jaya (48th years old), has, in fact, published an article in a nationally accredited journal.He has just graduated form a Ph.D. in ELT from a public university in East Java and he is a lecturer of the ELT program.Lastly, Iman (35th years old) has never been published in scientific journals.However, he frequently participated as a speaker in several national ELT conferences.Now he is one of the lecturers at one of the universities in Indonesia.

Data collection
The data of this study were obtained by interview, observation and documentation.The interview had been done by using semi structured interview to the respondents in three times.The researcher asked some questions related to how they started and ended their writing process.Moreover, the researcher did the observation to the respondents and followed their daily activity in the process of writing for the publication.Lastly, documentation was used to collect the data about their publication process and result.

Data analysis
The data form the interview process had been transfered into a transcript.We first read the transcripts carefully to gain a holistic view of the meaning.Then, we constructed a "lived story" (Eastmond, 2007) for each participant.This lived story was echoed through holistic content analysis (Beal, 2013) to keep chronology united from interview data.It then results in different categories presented by each participant.After generating the categories, we continued to use categorical content analysis (László et al., 2013) to see emerging themes appearing in the analysis.The data from interviewed were compared with the observation and documentation results then analyzed with the previous works to see differences various input among them and to achieve best and trusted answer for the research question.

Findings and Discussion
The results of the in-depth interviews shed light on different appealing points of view and ways used by the participants to engage in research, writing, and publishing motivation.However, the participants realized that conducting research, writing articles based on the research, and then publishing articles constitute a long process of undertaking.The uncovered ways to construct self-motivation in the scholarly publication used by novice writers were: .

Constructing self-motivation in conducting research
To construct self-motivation in conducting research, the novice writers shared diverse ways such as the way in managing time, professional requirement, and consistency of reading activity; Ningsih, as the first participant in this study, shared that the key to sustained research motivation is how well writers manage their time.Besides, she set the reason why she should do research, and she did many discussions.It is depicted in her narrative: I did a lot of discussions with my friends before conducting research.I also had someone who understood about research, and he is a tutor for doing research.For me, when I can conduct research and write the article, then publish it, it will be one of my success.The more I got the knowledge about publishing, writing, and conducting research, the more I am motivated to be a good writer in the publication.
Being different from the previous participant, Jaya considers that the primary motivation in conducting research is not only the requirement of his profession but also as self-actualization.He thought that having research motivation is pretty much needed by novice writers in writing articles for publication.He felt that an article could be made based on the result of the research.The following narrative accounts exemplified how Jaya attempted to manage his time and to engage in sustained motivation in reading as the way to find ideas in writing research: Besides being the requirement of my profession, writing is also a form of selfactualization; managing time is never an easy task, yet I force myself to make time, I have a scheduled my "reading time" to read articles.Two heads are usually better than one.I talk to my friends, colleagues, my sisters, and even my wife (who is also an English teacher).Sometimes, you can have a great idea even from the simplest discussion.
As a novice writer, Iman constantly manages his time to read an article, at least one day one article.Discussing to solve the problem when encountering writer block and lost his motivation in doing research benefits Iman.He believed that in conducting research, reading a lot of references is necessary to navigate the novelty of the research and add knowledge to the area of the researched topics.He expressed the following reasons as the main motivation for conducting research.He said:

Constructing self-motivation in publishing process
In terms of the publishing process, Ningsih has a different way to enhance her self-motivation.The long process of learning how to publish anywhere and anytime has enabled her to learn a lot of things about publishing.Her tutor and the writing workshop with the tutor had helped her in developing knowledge about publishing and made her confident in trying to write an article for publication.She said: I have a tutor who is helping me pass the process of scholarly publication.He always gives me a critical review to improve the content of my article.My tutor also helps me to decide the target journal for my article.Therefore, I will be more confident about publishing my article.
However, Jaya paid the attention to the target readers, searching for indexed journals, and attending some workshops are his strategies to keep motivated in writing for scholarly publication.He narrated: When aiming for a reputable journal, I seldom think about my readers.Since the journal I am aiming for is rather specific, I assume that the readers would be people of similar backgrounds with me, i.e., ELT teachers, scholars, or students.Naturally, I thought about the journal Quartile (as in Scopus Q), the H index, the number of volumes which have been published, and the area of the journal.I have joined in several workshops.I always get new tips and tricks from the speakers.Workshops are a very good place to meet people and learn new things.There is always something new to learn.
Iman has set indented journals and readers for his articles.He engaged in sustained motivation despite his inadequacy in writing articles.To ease his ways, he began writing for nationally accredited journals before moving to international publications.His accounts are narrated below: My target readers are academicians; I thought that they could understand my article.I have a national standard for the journal that I want to choose, free of charge; then I continue to an international journal with minimal indexing of Q4; I believe everything will have progress.Five years later on I need to make progress in my submission year by year.For now, I will submit my article to the ISOLEC conference.Writing for publication is very helpful for me as a beginner, I got a lot of knowledge about writing, publishing and conducting research.

Discussion
The narrative analysis of this semi-structured interview unveiled that the participants struggled to employ various attempts to sustained motivation in writing for scholarly publication processes.This study portrayed multi-facet complexities encountered by the participants in their motivation for scholarly publication, ranging from limited knowledge on writing for scholarly publication (Alimorad, 2018), time constraints (Cabanas et al., 2018), writer block experiences (Casanave, 2019;Li, Franken, & Wu, 2019), low of academic writing skill (Karimnia, 2013), and complicatedness in avoiding plagiarism (Yang, Stockwell, & McDonnell, 2019).Interestingly, this study documented that these participants make use of their innovative learning locks to write for scholarly publications.It was evident from their success in passing their problems during the process of writing for publication.
To reach sustained scholarly writing motivation, two engaging ways were used by the participants.They started to generate ideas by reading articles as many as possible, which are in their areas of interest.The ways of getting ideas for research were similar to some previous studies, which stated that reading various articles with the same topics as our research will help us in finding the ideas to conduct research (Kirkpatrick, 2019), and it helps authors to know some of the writing styles for article (Casanave, 2018;Karimnia, 2013).These participants have their reasons to conduct research such as for the development of future academic carrier (Caputo, 2019) or even to fulfill the requirement to pass doctoral and magister degrees (Lei & Hu, 2019).Those reasons serve as their motivation to start doing research (Shvidko & Atkinson, 2019).
This study also captured participants' complicatedness in writing scientific articles.Writing is a significant barrier for novice writers in the process of writing for publication (Karimnia, 2013).The long process of writing an article has the potential to decrease novice writers' motivation.However, three participants in this research navigated varied attempts to face these complexities.Doing discussion and having peer review activities are ways that the participants chose to keep their sustained writing motivation (Fazel, 2019;Tardy, 2019).They also preferred doing peer review with friends rather than with lecturers due to flexibility and the absence of time constraints.
Discussion and peer review are the ways that the participants opted for refining their writing quality.An open discussion could be an effective way of solving problems, including the problem of quality of writing (Alimorad, 2018).Peer review helps improve the quality of various elements of writing, such as content, organization, and grammatical mistakes (Hyland, 2008).The result of the present study also showed that a good research mentor influences the quality of articles the participants write.It is relevant to previous work, suggesting that the role of a mentor in a workshop will help a novice writer to achieve knowledge and skill of research (Kaur & Singh, 2018).
Deciding on reputable journals in the process of writing for scholarly publication is important.In this study, the participants considered submitting articles to national and international journals after inquiries to their research mentors.This gesture is required in order to be published in an ethical and professional journal (Jiang, Borg & Borg, 2017).It is then necessary to integrate more practices in research and writing, as well as good knowledge and awareness in publications to reduce the barrier of learning and to face the challenges in writing for publication (Casanave, 2018).
Avoiding plagiarism and high similarity, based on the participants' accounts, can be done through several approaches.For instance, reducing similarity level can be done by modifying the words of citation or by checking plagiarism detecting software, making community of research to discuss about how to conduct research (Kirkpatrick, 2019), finding a good mentor by attending research-related workshops to help in the process of pre-publishing (Kaur & Singh, 2018), attending some related workshops to get more knowledge in writing and publishing an article (Jalongo & Saracho, 2016) and having discussion with other scholars (Alimorad, 2018).
This study has attempted to unfold how the three novice writers in scholarly publication construct their sustained motivation during publication processes.The multi-facet dimensions of writing for scholarly publications have been portrayed accordingly.The accounts voiced by the participants of this study signal that they continually engage in the complexities of writing for scholarly publication, despite the many deficiencies they encountered.

Conclusion
In this study, the motivation construction of three novice writers in writing for scholarly publication has been portrayed.From the findings, it is concluded that, for them, writing for scholarly publication is not easy; some processes must be carried out before the publication.In the process of pre-publishing, the power of motivation is needed.This study found several appealing ways that novice writers have used to keep sustained research, writing, and publishing motivation.Consequently, these attempts could share practical contributions to scholars in managing self-motivation in writing for scholarly publication.In terms of research motivation, reading many articles related to the authors' research interests can opt for sustained engagement.Discussion and peer review activities can be designed to help notice standard academic conventions in journal articles.This study ends with a suggestion for continued training in scholarly publication processes, especially for novice writers.Enacting research groups mentored by senior researchers for these writers are offered to be continuously done, from pre-publishing to final-stage publishing processes.The focus of this study only for novice writer and their motivation construction, therefore, there is a bunch of chance to dive deeply and specifically about this topic with difference concern.