Does anyone know of any resources/books/guidance on how to write for peer-review journals? Im coming to the end of my PhD and while the emphasis from my supervisors is understandably about how to write the thesis itself, id like to start thinking about publishing some of it, and some guidance would be quite useful...any ideas?

the best way is to read existing articles in the journals you want to target. And also the journals guidelines on what they want in terms of word count, referencing format etc.

As opposed to what happens when you write a thesis, that you leave both the introduction and conclusions till the end; and usually because of the imminent fall of the deadline they are not the best of writing. In a journal paper these two sections are precisely the most important since reviewers are not very patient and they want to know up front that the paper has potential, and that in different and original. So the trick is to answer two questions: Why bother? (introduction) and ...so what? (conclusions). Then, just fill in the inner sections to make sure that the whole thing makes sense.

All good advice so far. Most PhD advice books cover paper writing to an extent, though I found Dunleavy's "Authoring a PhD" to be most informative when I was turning a small piece of my research into a journal paper which was accepted for peer-review journal with only tiny changes. That was because it helped to demystify the process and make me think I could tackle it. Just have to finish writing a thesis now!

A useful book is Writing for Academic Journals

http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/html/0335213928.html

Some tips I had from a Journal editor:

1. What's the question that underpins the enquiry?
2. How does the question tie in with your theoretical framework?
3. What's the literature that frames the study (wider contexts)?
4. What methods were used and how were they appropriate to the question?
5. How was the data analysed and presented? Was a particular framework used?
6. Is it empirical or polemic (a think piece)?
7. You need to address the questions: 'So what?' and 'Who cares?'

Also agree with previous posters, read journals, familiarise yourself with style, content, and requirements - read guidelines for authors (usually available on website).

Good luck.

thanks bakuvia that's really very useful to me too. writing the first article is so daunting and seems to be such a mystery, it's good to have some guidelines