Writing your first paper

When you start writing your first paper and then submitting it into a journal, you will find it difficult and perhaps seek help from your Ph.D. guide throughout the process who hardy gives you time (you are lucky if your guide is of a different kind). Frankly speaking, writing the first paper and making this acceptable to a good journal is not an easy task. Unless you are careful enough (and sometimes lucky too) chance of rejection of your paper is very high. But despite all efforts, sending your paper back to you by the journal for two to three revisions are quite normal. Choosing a proper journal is very important for early publication. In this post, I shall try to explain how should you choose the journal for your first publication and the way you should write your paper to avoid major revision or rejection.     

Choosing your first journal

You must publish your paper in a peer-reviewed journal that is indexed by Scopus or any other reputed indexing agency - otherwise, it will have no value. For your first paper, you should avoid hard journals. The quality or standard of journals are generally determined by two things - first its Impact Factor (IF) and second, the publisher. Apart from these two, the h-index is also a factor to determine journal quality. Based on these quality considerations, scientific journals are categorized into four classes - Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. Where Q1 journals are considered of the highest quality and Q4 of the lowest. The journal you are going to choose must be an ISI (Institute of Scientific Information) recognized journal and preferably present in the Scopus database. The impact factor of an ISI journal refers to the average number of citations that it receives in other journals per year. The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) publishes a list of journals and their IF every year. IF of more than 1 is considered to be a good journal while more than 6 to be excellent. But there is a loophole in this system. Those journals which publish papers only in a particular area of a field - e.g. the area of Planetary Sciences in the field of Astrophysics or Space Sciences, receive less citation due to obvious reasons (since the area is confined so citation is also less), and hence their IF are also low, whereas they actually may publish very high-quality papers. So IF of 3 can also be excellent for some journals. When you perform your survey of literature as I discussed in an earlier post, you should also look for the journal IF of the papers you are reading. In this way, you'll gain an idea about the quality of the journals of your research area and the corresponding IF. Journals of less IF but good publishers such as - Elsevier, Springer, IOP, Oxford University Press, etc. are also considered to be standard journals for publication. You will find many renowned authors of your field writing small articles in such journals. If your work is significant enough having many figures, a detailed theoretical discussion, many data and tables,  etc. so that it easily covers 15-20 pages or more, you should go for an average IF journal for your first publication. But for a small work that concentrates on a particular point of a study, a less IF but from a good publisher is suitable. For researchers in India, sometimes it is thought that it is easier to publish papers in an Indian journal, but unfortunately, Indian publications are usually not given enough weightage in the international community (actually in India too) despite rigorous peer-review process in these journals. I would say it will be better to choose a less IF foreign journal rather than an Indian journal because although the standard of publications is the same, the former will receive more weightage in the scientific community than the latter.

How to write?

If you have done your survey of literature properly, you must have got an idea about how people write a paper. But despite that, after you write a paper for the first time, there will always be certain mistakes or misrepresentations which will be not visible to you but visible to any other experienced reader. This is true for almost everyone in the research field and people learn gradually the art of scientific paper writing after many revisions and then the chance of early acceptance of a paper for publication increases. I shall try to share with you my experience and what I have learnt after many major revisions and even rejections of my papers. Here I assume that you are aware of journal-specific writing and styles and therefore I will not talk about it. However, nowadays many journals accept manuscript submission in any format you like and you will be required to make necessary format or style related corrections only after the acceptance of your paper.

When you write a paper, the paper should be written in such a manner that when the reader reads your paper he or she easily understands the aim and objectives of your work. The most important point you should be careful about is that - the aim of the work which you will describe in the introduction part of your paper must match what you present subsequently and finally conclude. Sometimes such mismatch happens in an unwilling manner. For example, probably you were talking about a previous work done by someone else in the past, but, to the reader, it appears to be the subject of your study. There may be several similar cases. I suffered several negative comments from the reviewers for my early papers only because of this reason and therefore now I remain very careful about this. Next what is important is that you must give a good survey of literature in the introduction section of your paper. A good survey of literature reflects the standard of your paper and also makes the article informative. I know it is quite time consuming to read a large number of full research articles and sometimes all of them may not be completely understandable to a new researcher, but, if you read Abstract and then Introduction, Figures/Tables and finally the Discussion/Conclusion, I think it is sufficient to understand the work and maybe then included in your reference. Next, your paper must not give any such statement or argument which is not justifiable from either a mathematical point of view or from previous works. Every information that you give in your paper must follow a reference to prove its authenticity. If you want to make a guess or a hypothesis of your own - you must give a justification, otherwise, this gives a negative impression about you to the reviewer. You should refrain from including unnecessary discussions or topics in your paper (to increase its volume) which actually have nothing to do with your present work. If you are thinking to submit your paper in a good IF journal, you must remember that they do not publish papers that do not comply with their standard. Actually, a paper that can be accepted in a low IF journal may not be acceptable in a high IF journal. Even if your work is significant enough to be published, but is a concise one, it may be rejected because of this reason. So, be careful to write your paper with full details of your work with lots of figures, tables, mathematical formulae, theoretical discussions etc. in order to make your work look significant and standard enough for the journal of your choice. Most journals ask for comments from two reviewers and both of them must agree independently on your paper for publication. Try to avoid these journals for your first paper and go for those where the number of reviewers is only one. It is not that reviewers are always correct. They also make mistakes and give unnecessary and invalid comments. When you write a reply to the reviewer's comments, answer them logically and without using any adverse comments. Never give up if you receive lots of hard comments from the reviewer. If you can satisfy the reviewer(s) by answering the points raised by him/her, whatever wrong your work maybe - it will be surely published. Sometimes additional work is required to be done during the revision and then finally it becomes publishable. Non-native English writers must be careful about their English because sometimes a grammatically wrong sentence may change its meaning. This is very common and happened to me too.

Points to remember

• Be sure to describe clearly your aims and objectives and maintain their consistency throughout the article.
• Give a good survey of literature by including many past works in the relevant topic in the introduction.
• Do not make a statement or logic that you may not defend if asked by the reviewers.
• Try to include mathematical content even if it is not mandatory for your subject. But do that cleverly so that it does not appear unnecessary to the reader.
• Answer the reviewer's comments 'to the point' in the revision stage. Do not try to please the reviewer by giving extra information not asked by the reviewers.
• Take care of the language and its grammar.

This is not all - but much of what I have learned and now sharing with you. Hope it will help you a bit in choosing the journal and preparing your paper for your first publication.