Strategies and techniques for publishing papers

Drawn from http://ir.hit.edu.cn/cgi-bin/newbbs/leoboard.cgi

The article, written by Peter. lawrence and published on nature's March 03's issue, is cute and thought-provoking, and is gonna be helpful to scientists and postgraduate students committed with scientific research and article publishing. -- Terry

-----------------------------------------------------------

Strategies and techniques for publishing papers

Peter A. Lawrence

(Nature, 422, p259. 20 March 2003)

Listen: many scientists around the world are suffering from Purgatory. London is late at night, and Deborah dormouse is still sleep. She had been anxiously waiting for four weeks and she was not sure if she had called the editor of nature to ask if her paper would have a negative effect. In sunny Sydney, Wayne wombat was furious because his student's paper was rejected by science and cell was asking him to review a paper with similar content, he wants revenge. In San Francisco, Melissa Mariposa read that her paper for contemporary biology had to be halved before it could be reconsidered. She had to reluctantly delete some key data and make the results extremely simplified because her postdoc needed to include the Journal on his resume; otherwise, he would not be given a job in Madrid, Spain.

Whether a paper can be published depends on the interaction between the author, the editor, and the reviewer. More and more scientists are posting papers to a few of the top journals, wasting time and energy on theoretical papers to make editors happy. This approach ultimately harms the purpose of the paper, the availability of the article, and the quality of the study itself.

One major reason

In the field of Biomedical Sciences, increasing pressure has forced scientists to publish papers in top journals, which has contributed to this trend. Even in our daily speech, we have a crush on top journals-we say that someone is a good graduate student because he published a paper in cell. This shows that journals are more important than scientific information. This means that if we publish papers in top journals, our goal will be achieved, otherwise we will fail.

Why is this happening? In part, the reason is that people who have the power to fund and allocate jobs do not evaluate the research itself, but are measured by the performance index, it is easier to add up some numbers than to seriously think about a person's achievements. Managers are stealing the power of scientists. They create a "score Responsibility System" culture to establish the most perfect administrative system and effectively control research institutions and researchers. As a result, the society has become an Audit Society (Audit Society): Each indicator is accurately calculated, and the final indicator is the goal.

In such an "Audit Society", the number of published papers, the sort of authors in the list, and the Impact Factors of journals have become the basis for evaluating scientists. In Japan, Spain, and other parts of the world, this evaluation method has evolved into a well-known formula. However, Administrators cannot take full responsibility for this, and many scientists enthusiastically participate in it. When Will some artificial indicators become the goal of scientific work? Although there are various great reasons to say that there will be more extensive reading for papers published in top journals, when we place the importance of journals on science itself, we have changed ourselves into a cheesy and uncultured generation in our own world. (We place ourselves in the academic world as mediocre people .)

Some scientists are aware of this problem, but why are most scientists so keen on journals? There are two reasons for mental and career. Young Scientists will post a good article in a good journal as the starting point for entering the scientific crown. Prestigious scientists hope to publish papers in top journals to prove that they still have high opinions. Compared with building a reputation in the kingdom of scientific discovery, all people gradually realize that it is safer and easier to gather "capital" in today's Audit Society, which is really hard-currency. Another factor is that the current society is frantically pursuing popularity, and scientists cannot help themselves. Many scientists are grateful when their work is reported by the media (whether accurate or not), and the leading magazines are also paving the way for it through press releases. For example, the Spanish newspaper El Pais often reports on any article published by Spanish scientists on nature, cell, and science.

Consequence

This has brought a series of consequences to the author, editor, and reviewer's behavior.

The author must decide when and how to write their research work. The ideal time for writing a thesis is when a research work has come to an end and a convincing message has been obtained. However, the practical practice is often to start writing at the earliest time when results are available. As a result, the scientific discovery is cut into slices like an Italian sausage, and then submitted to different journals for more papers.

Scientists must do their best to do their work as quickly as possible to minimize the risk of rejection. The top journal will never consider papers with similar results that competitors have published, even if the study has been submitted for several years for only one or two weeks. Of course, if two competitive articles are submitted to the journals at the same time, each author will use another paper to attract the attention of the editors and think that their research topics are hot. Without a doubt, the submission and report of the paper have left many scientists sleepless nights.

The author needs to decide how to publish their papers in top journals. Can the research results be hyped to the topic? Is it necessary to simplify a complicated problem to attract people? Is it possible to find an imaginary information in the paper so that people can remember it immediately? Have you found a vague link related to human diseases? (The reference to human diseases often increases the number of papers cited in the future and makes the magazine attractive .) Can we reduce the length of the article to a shorter value? For example, even if the paper should be submitted to more professional journals in a longer form, more services will be provided to readers. Can I compress it into a shorter form and submit it to nature? The short text on nature and the report on science are often compressed, and the content is very unconspicuous, making it difficult for readers ***. Supplementary materials on the Internet may alleviate this problem, but readers of the printed version will feel that the Internet is not so convenient, and their electronic versions are also worrying about the release time.

In this way, more and more research team leaders begin to write their own papers. They may not be involved in the experiment, and the experiment work is mainly done by junior scientists. However, the research team leader has rich experience and knows how to present his work in the best way. This may be the reason why he does not know the details of the experiment. The students and postdocs returned to the table to work hard to increase output. However, they did not learn how to write research reports.

Edit: the editors of top journals always receive too many submissions. For example, the Journal of nature needs to receive a manuscript of about 9000 points a year (two times that of 10 years ago), so it has to reject about 95% of his bio-medical papers. Developmental Biology is a high-quality professional journal with a rejection rate of 70%, which was 1990 in 50%. Top journals receive too many articles and cannot send them to their peers for review. Therefore, the power in the editing hands is much more important than the reviewer's judgment. As a result, the authors began to draw, flatter, and even threaten to edit the program by various means. The team lead can prove that it is worthwhile to spend time and talent on these strategies, because the editors will shake and the success returns very high. The combination of Impact Factors and economics is used to establish competition among top journals (cell magazine was recently switched to the market at a very high price ). The result is editing and even asking star scientists to write the most popular papers for journals. All these forces are combined to create an anti-scientific culture. The limelight and *** wrist will receive a higher reward, however, imaginative methods, high-quality research results, and rational debates become insignificant.

Even experienced editors are difficult to make accurate judgments: It is basically impossible to perform objective and rapid screening in a large number of papers. Services based on the Internet can provide some help for editing, but it is still difficult to see the real problems in the dark corner of the professional. For safety and safety, editors prefer the results of popular, familiar, and expected results, rather than those that seem odd, unexpected, or original. This error occurs. Michael Berridge and Robin Irvine, a primitive paper on creatine phosphate and signal, became the second most popular paper in 1980s, but the paper was initially rejected by nature. The author fought up and was finally accepted. However, when Berridge combined some information and added some new ideas to form another paper, he was again rejected by nature, although the last paper was published in the Journal of biochemistry, it ranked 1980s among the most widely used papers in 5th.

Reviewer: Of course, the reviewer is also the author of the paper. He just put on a different hat. Conflicts are inevitable. For example, Will reviewers support competitors' work and put their students' careers in danger? This conflict of interests can explain why two reviewers in the same field think about the same paper differently. To make things worse, the editors of top journals will also assign additional tasks to reviewers. In the evaluation of traditional science and technology, objective criteria are paramount. In addition, the reviewer is now required to check whether a paper is a paper that can be published in the "science" journal, that is to say, whether it is to make a judgment on the papers that interest the majority of readers. Include reviewers
Editing the practices in the decision-making process gives reviewers the opportunity to damage the authors they do not like, settle their complaints, and delay their competitors. From my years of editing experience, a few reviewers have taken this opportunity. There are also some reviewers who transfer their papers between several journals, making it especially difficult for scientists who lack the ** wrist to publish their work, especially when the research results are different from the existing knowledge. Some dominant scientists reach a tacit understanding between each other: they invite each other to join the Committee, nominate each other at the meeting to win the prize, and hold each other's papers, scientific objectivity is therefore threatened.

Another related phenomenon recently is to send the paper to three reviewers for review. Although this is partly done to ensure that at least two review comments will be received, I think this is the case if we want to ensure that we will not get a draw. The decisions made by the vote encourage rejected authors to make empty complaints, praise reviewers who support them, slander those who hold negative comments, and request New reviewers, to get new support.

Under heavy pressure, the editor handed the author's power to the reviewer in another way. Even if the reviewers may ignore considerable details and may form comments on a paper within half an hour, they generally require the author to modify or make new experiments. However, the easiest and most common choice for editing is to allow the author to satisfy all reviewers and send the modified papers to them for review. If the author has enough reason to disagree with the reviewer's opinions, he will be in a dilemma: they either spend time doing experiments that they think are likely to be useless, or draw conclusions that are not supported by their own results. If they do not, the dissatisfaction of unknown reviewers will not be solved, and the editors will stick to their original views. In the past, these authors sent their papers everywhere, but now journals become so important enough to influence their careers that they have to succumb. In this situation, the reviewer is more like an examiner than a reviewer. In this case, I have seen too many people. Sometimes, researchers may waste months of research time, and someone else may have published a paper first.

There is a growing pressure to publish faster time, exchange of materials, and be threatened to appear in court to force journals to publish the names of reviewers. As a result, some journals provide green channels for some specially selected authors to publish papers online in advance to help them beat their competitors in time competition. However, some reviewers may use the information of the papers they have reviewed to delay others' time to modify their papers, or even publish their papers elsewhere. The temptation and suspicion have accumulated, which has melted the thick wall that the author of the paper should trust. I believe that there is real confusion in the reviewer's understanding of the degree of confidentiality they should adopt. Should the reviewer follow the confidentiality principle of disclosing a manuscript to anyone? I think it should be, but do we all follow it? Should the reviewer agree to the requirements for reviewing a manuscript that he has suggested to reject from another journal? I don't think he should agree, but this kind of thing often happens.

Remedies

Not surprisingly, the author is becoming increasingly sensitive and suspicious. About half of the papers I received asked me not to send them to a reviewer, mainly because of "conflict of interests ". However, latent words are worried about misuse of information in the paper. In fact, they also admit that they sometimes want to avoid harsh eyes and criticism.

My main purpose here is to raise your awareness of the status quo. However, we can begin to work together to improve the board and ease the superstition of journals. The most effective change is that management institutions should no longer trust the wrong audit data when deciding on funds and projects. Compared with the editors and reviewers who have received the manuscript, these organizations have the opportunity for Zhuge Liang to better understand things afterwards. They can ask themselves whether the key papers published by project candidates are scientific and enlightening? Whether it has been proved influential
Have the results been confirmed by others?

The author also helps to break the worship of journals. One of the methods is to establish mutual support alliances, such as in the field of cell signal transmission (http://www.signaling-gateway.org ). If scientists who have already made achievements are pushing to properly publish papers on open websites or specialized journals (rather than non-professional journals such as nature or science ), it will set a good example for young scientists. This will also reduce the huge pressure on top journals, so that these journals can begin to publish more complete papers to facilitate readers to read and understand, and thus truly save the "average readers ".

I do not recommend that you reform the review process. For example, I don't think the open review will be helpful, mainly because the young reviewers will be threatened, and the influence of existing scientists will be enhanced. One feasible measure is to submit two papers online so that the reviewers do not know the author's name. However, the key issue is to clarify the responsibilities and obligations of reviewers and make them available to the public.

Professional editors must understand these risks. They had to make a decision that was crucial to the author, especially when the rejection rate was as high as 95%. It is understandable that the editors may have pushed a large number of their responsibilities to the reviewers. Editors may not have enough professional research background or first-hand knowledge, especially in a narrow field. However, this sort of recommendation from reviewers is useless. Editors should act immediately to reestablish the author's rights.
Once you decide to publish a paper, the editor must not simply ask the author to satisfy the comments of the reviewers X, Y, and Z, but explain the suggestions of the reviewers, and willing to accept rational approval and discussion. Editors should make decisions between themselves or seek further expert opinions on the premise of giving both sides their opinions. The editor should be fully aware that, unlike the signed author, anonymous reviewers are not responsible for their mistakes. The editor should always remember that the reviewer's role is to provide suggestions to the editor, rather than obtaining the author's theory.
Any control.

On the question of academic importance, editors should have a longer-term and broader perspective, and through affirmative behavior on the Content of research that is inconsistent with the trend, actively encourage new methods and topics. The trend has led to the pursuit of new cellular signal conduction as the most popular research topic at present, which leads to unnecessary repetitive work. Unfortunately, four independent research papers recently published are repetitive work on the same new gene (pygopus gene), each of which records
The meticulous and hard work of many people over several years.

As an author, we gave up our efforts to allow non-professionals to read and access our papers. This article contains bubbles and terminologies. Part of the reason is that we record our work in stenography so that the paper can be written into a small version. However, why not let the article be more readable, reduce the abbreviations and exaggerated languages of the first letter, and put detailed methods and supplementary materials online?

Now is the time for our older and established scientists to change the status quo. We should establish important principles on the Commission for economic and job positions and do not force papers to be published in top-level journals in such despair. We should not expect young scientists to call for change at the risk of losing their future for the common benefit of the scientific community. At least we should not let them sacrifice themselves before us.
 
-- Life is unfair and we need to adapt to it.