Six steps to get your scientific article published in a peer-review journal

Six steps to get your scientific article published in a peer-review journal
BY MEHDI KESHAVARZ HEDAYATI on AUGUST 19, 2015 • ( 3 )
Professional presentation of your research work as an article is very essential for researchers and students and it is indeed the best way to disseminate your work´s output with your fellows. However, the main obstacle in your way to publish your work are editors and reviewers of the journals! It is generally hard to convince them that your work worth publishing. Here, I am going to give you some hints in order to get your work published (provided that its contents scientifically sound!). I think by following the steps which are listed below, you can make sure that your paper will be evaluated based on scientific merits and you could avoid the rejection of your work because of poor presentation.

1# Select the targeted journal: the first step (even before drafting the first few sentences) is to select the journal that you want to publish your paper. Many people write their manuscript first and then try to format it according to the journal to which they want to submit the manuscript! But if you consider your target journal first, you can arrange the contents of your article according to interest of the editor and the language of the journal! This way, you certainly make a good impression to the editor and it is very likely that the editor send your manuscript to reviewers for evaluation.

2# Be specific in title: the title of your article is the “packaging” of the article, more ambitious and attractive the title is, the rate of success is higher. Never use simple words and expression for title. Assume that your manuscript is about climate changes and according to your studies, you have found that the temperature of the earth’s climate system has risen few degrees of Celsius since 2005. In this scenario, the worst action would be to use the following (boring) titles: “study of the earth´s climate change” or “Investigation of earth´s climate change”. But instead of that, you can highlight the main conclusion of your work in the title. For instance, “Dramatic rise of global temperature since 2005”.

3# Smart abstract: do not only summarize the results of your work in the abstract but also include a very short survey of literature (maximum two lines) at the start of abstract. It will provide a good impression to the readers (in particular editor and reviewer) and they would feel that your work will push the frontier of your field forward. In other words, the abstract of the paper should not solely represent the outcome of your paper rather than being the short version of your paper.

4# Simple and comprehensive introduction: Literature survey or introduction is the essential part of each paper. There, you should provide a short story on the latest progress (state-of-the-art) on the topic of your research. You should especially try to show that the scope of your work addresses the most challenging aspects of the field. In other words, you should convince the editor and reviewers that you are about to push forward the front-line of the field by this work. Note that the last sentence should make a linkage between the state-of-the-art in the subject of your work and your contribution to the field. As an example similar to step 2, you can write: “the global warming is most serious anxious of current century which might lead to fatal end if no proper measure are taken to stop it. Hence, knowing the rate of temperature rise in the past could provide us a better insight in order stop or reduce it. In this work, we have systematically measure the temperature changes and …” and then continue with the details of your objective.

5# Attractive illustration: Graphs are part of majority of scientific articles. If you make them nicer, the comments that you will get from the journals are nice, too! A simple illustration in which the summary of your objective is depicted can be very helpful. As an example, I have made two graphs in which the same results are aimed to be shown. Proper font size, color and features can make a boring results attractive! Below you see two graphs wherein the temperature gradient in 10 years are drawn. I guess, the difference is too obvious and do not need further comment (both the graphs are drawn by Excel 2013 (relevant software’s are listed in our earlier posts)).

graph

6# Importance of conclusion: apparently you should sum up the outcome of your works but try to add an ambitious perspective to your results. For instance for the case of study on climate warming mentioned in step 2, you can end up your conclusion like that:”…these results can warn politician to take an immediate action to reduce the pollution and thereby save the earth from a disaster.” As you see, although the aim of your study was a temperature change analysis, but still you could further show the importance of the results (as a global issue) in summary and conclusion.

These steps make your works much brilliant that they are. Therefore, publishing of your work (results of several years of studies) will be much easier!