Publishing your scientific paper: tips and tricks from a scientific editor

I have written several posts about my work as a scientific editor, but I haven't talked about performing institutional visits, which I sometimes combine with an author workshop discussing the publication process. At Elsevier, these author workshops are given by many different people across the company and they start with the title "How to Publish in Scholarly Journals". Over time, my talk has evolved to focus on the scientific editor's perspective on the publication process; I try to give the audience my pro-tips for navigating peer review from start to finish. The major theme of my talk is making it easy for people to read and interpret your paper: first, the journal's editors (who you want to send it out for review), then the reviewers (who you want to review it fairly and favorably), and finally the readers (who you want to read the paper so they can cite it). I have given this talk enough times that it is starting to feel like my own. I even have a couple of good zingers, including one about the authors who requested that no one from Japan review their paper (obviously we could not satisfy that exclusion request).*

Every time I give this talk, I refer to several online resources that I have found useful in putting together my slides.** Because my blog audience is much broader than my typical seminar audience, I decided to put together a collection of the best of these resources in combination with some of my own tips. 

General Tips: 

• Advice from a scientific editor (my post from a few years ago)
• Milka Kostic, Editor for the journal Structure, wrote a nice set of posts on Getting Your Paper Published that covers many of the steps in the process: craft your title and abstract, put your cover letter to work, tell a story, keep it simple, and be mindful of your audience. 
• Elsevier's Publishing Campus has lots of great resources for writing your research article.
• How to get published in academic journals: top tips from editors (Guardian)

Preparing your Manuscript:

• 11 steps to structuring a science paper that editors will take seriously (Elsevier)
• 8 ways to help reviewers assess your manuscript (Cell Press)
• How to get the most out of your reviewer suggestions (Cell Press)
• How to avoid publishing conflicts (Elsevier)

Preparing your Figures/Image Manipulation Policies: 

• Common Pitfalls in Figure Preparation (Cell Press)
• What's in a picture? The temptation for image manipulation (Journal of Cell Biology)
• Image Manipulation: cleaning up the scholarly record (Scholarly Kitchen)
• Checking out our figures (Cell Press)  
• JCB did a ten part series that covered "Everything you need to know about image screening at the Rockefeller University Press" (Journal of Cell Biology)

Revisions and Rejections: 

• Decoding the Decision Letter (Cell Press)
• If at first you don't succeed, cool off, revise, and submit again (Science)

Getting Your Paper Noticed: 

• After your paper is published, remember to share your work with others and follow how your paper is doing. 
• First, you might want to read this post on Scholastica about why this is important.
• Elsevier's Publishing Campus has additional tips and tricks
• Altmetric and Mendeley Stats can help you gauge the impact of your article before citations start. 

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* The Tufts Post doc association has a blog post about my visit.

** I recently noticed that I refer frequently to the Cell Press CrossTalk blog in my author talk. While I work for the same company as the Cell Press folks, I do not actually receive any click-through dividends. It just happens to be a great site with many useful posts.

Altmetric Explorer as a complement to your news reader for keeping up with exciting new research

Altmetric is one of several tools currently available to track the usage of published articles via social media, mainstream media, and reference managers. The Almetric score is calculated by giving different weights to each mention of a published article, so that a newspaper story counts more than a blog post, which is worth more than a tweet. The benefit of alternative metrics is that it can give researchers instant feedback on the impact of their article. Alternative metrics can also be used by publishers and editors to help determine what could be the next high impact story. Importantly, it is unclear whether Almetric scores correlate with citation rate. At this time, only 15-25% of papers receive any Almetric score, depending on the field.  

 Altmetric Explorer is a new tool from Altmetric for examining the impact of articles using a variety of search parameters. You can search all mentions of papers to see what the most popular stories may be at any given time. By creating workspaces for individual searches, you can have the results updated by email on a regular basis. You can export all the articles or export the Altmetric data to Excel, allowing you to sort for papers based on an individual metric (e.g., Mendeley or blog posts). Workspaces could include searches of a particular set of journals to see all the high-attention content in one space. Alternatively, a search with a keyword can indicate where the most attention-grabbing stories in a particular area are being published. 

Altmetric Explorer is easy to learn to use and the help desk has been very responsive, giving answers in 24 hours. This is a for-fee service, but as an Elsevier employee, I have free access to a publisher account. I started experimenting with Altmetric Explorer as a tool for content development. While it has not been helpful for that purpose, I have found it to be a nice complement to my news reader/RSS feed for finding new, interesting stories published in the journals that I normally follow.