Publishing a scientific paper - Part 1
It's been awhile. Hope you're handling any pandemic-related obstacles and that you're able to care for yourself and be safe. I've been struggling like crazy -- I absolutely hate working from home. Someone recently asked, "haven't you figured out how to work from home yet?!" Nope. Have not. It's a daily struggle, but I'm getting through it. Something I've been working on for the past 4 months is writing up the last paper from my PhD dissertation. I finally hit the "submit" button last night, so I thought I'd go through some of the highlights (lowlights?) of how research gets from an idea in your brain to words in a scientific peer-reviewed journal. Note: this is my particular experience with this particular paper...everyones experience is different, some are successfully published, others may be rejected for whatever the reason (it's complicated). These are my own thoughts and understandings of the process from what I've experienced.
Publishing a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal. What does that mean?
Scientific paper - kind of like a final report or essay (also called a manucript) describing your science question, motivation for the research, what you did, how you did it, your results, and a summary of your findings and conclusions, possibly some remaining work to be explored and how your work connects with the bigger picture
Publishing - the manuscript you wrote is printed (digitally nowadays) to a scientific journal (like an article in a magazine or column in a newspaper, but it takes a long time and is critiqued by multiple scientists) and distributed to people who are subscribed to the journal (it can be accessed anyone, but sometimes you have to pay to get a copy unless it's "open source", which means that authors paid extra to have it freely available...most of the time if you need the article for research and email the author, they'll give you a copy)
Peer-reviewed journal - a journal where the articles must be reviewed by other scientists in the field who will determine if the article has scientific merit and if any revisions (scientific, structural (grammar/organization), graph design, and more) need to be made. This can take about a month to complete, and that's only for round 1! If you get major revisions, you'll probably have to go through a second round. The reviewers are fellow scientists that know about your topic enough to critique the research -- it can be really intimidating. They review on a volunteer basis (we don't get paid for it and it can take hours to days to complete a full review) and are anonymous (you don't know who they are, but they know your name...which can bring its own issues)
I've been working on this research project since January 2019 (I was also writing my dissertation and taking a break, so it wasn't a continuous year of work). I've also been writing the paper since then! My mentors have encouraged me to start an outline of the paper first -- what is the science question? That's the main focus of the paper, and I use it to help guide the work and it helps to determine when the paper is "done". Have you answered the question you sought to explore? Yes! Then you have to stop because otherwise you can keep digging for years and never finish the project. There are always more questions that arise, but you need to remember that initial question that sparked the project.
I finally finished a draft of the paper sometime last month, which means I wrote down everything I wanted to say about the research project and had enough figures (graphs/plots) to support my findings. I have two co-authors who were actively helping revise the text (English isn't my first language, so grammar can be a challenge for me sometimes -- for example, I kept using the noun "dryer" instead of the adjective "drier" when describing an environment where there is less moisture in the air). They also helped add text to certain sections where I felt they could do a better job explaining a tool we used or a specific analysis.
After months of doing research, analyzing data, making plots, discussing the results with my co-authors, writing and writing and re-writing the ideas, revising the paper multiple times, I still had to send it to a fellow scientist at my laboratory for internal review. It helps to show the completed manuscript to someone who has not been involved in the research (and hasn't been staring at the text for months) to know if what we are presenting makes sense and there are no major flaws in our science.
Once the paper was accepted in its final form by my co-authors, I started the submission process. Essentially, I have to submit all the documents associated with the paper, like the manuscript and individual figure files, and also a cost estimate agreement. This is when you estimate how much it will cost to publish the paper. There are specific charges for the number of pages and the number of figures you...we had 46 pages of text (double-spaced) and 14 figures, resulting in an estimated cost of about $3,000. Yeah. It costs a lot of money to publish. I luckily don't directly pay this publication fee, my job does. They have funding set aside to pay the costs of publishing our work. We don't have to pay anything up front, you only pay if the paper is accepted for publication.
What happens now? Well, the paper will go through technical review by the publisher to make sure all their requirements have been met (did you include page numbers? are all the forms in order?), then it goes to the editor to determine appropriate reviewers for my work. For this particular journal, it's typical to get three anonymous reviewers who will provide their feedback on the manuscript. I'll have to wait for at least another month to hear back, so stay tuned for part 2!
Let me know if you have any specific questions! I left out a bunch of details, because it's honestly not that exiting of a process. Published research is used as a "currency" in science, the more papers you have the better. This can be troublesome, as not every project leads to a paper and it can encourage the end product being a published paper as opposed to science that helps society and pushes our field forward. It's funny to me that when I was in school I hated English class and now a large percentage of my job is reading endless piles of papers and writing/revising papers. It's a really tough process, but the main goal for me is to effectively communicate my research findings and tools to the community so that they can be inspired to keep investigating.
Publishing a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal. What does that mean?
Scientific paper - kind of like a final report or essay (also called a manucript) describing your science question, motivation for the research, what you did, how you did it, your results, and a summary of your findings and conclusions, possibly some remaining work to be explored and how your work connects with the bigger picture
Publishing - the manuscript you wrote is printed (digitally nowadays) to a scientific journal (like an article in a magazine or column in a newspaper, but it takes a long time and is critiqued by multiple scientists) and distributed to people who are subscribed to the journal (it can be accessed anyone, but sometimes you have to pay to get a copy unless it's "open source", which means that authors paid extra to have it freely available...most of the time if you need the article for research and email the author, they'll give you a copy)
Peer-reviewed journal - a journal where the articles must be reviewed by other scientists in the field who will determine if the article has scientific merit and if any revisions (scientific, structural (grammar/organization), graph design, and more) need to be made. This can take about a month to complete, and that's only for round 1! If you get major revisions, you'll probably have to go through a second round. The reviewers are fellow scientists that know about your topic enough to critique the research -- it can be really intimidating. They review on a volunteer basis (we don't get paid for it and it can take hours to days to complete a full review) and are anonymous (you don't know who they are, but they know your name...which can bring its own issues)
I've been working on this research project since January 2019 (I was also writing my dissertation and taking a break, so it wasn't a continuous year of work). I've also been writing the paper since then! My mentors have encouraged me to start an outline of the paper first -- what is the science question? That's the main focus of the paper, and I use it to help guide the work and it helps to determine when the paper is "done". Have you answered the question you sought to explore? Yes! Then you have to stop because otherwise you can keep digging for years and never finish the project. There are always more questions that arise, but you need to remember that initial question that sparked the project.
I finally finished a draft of the paper sometime last month, which means I wrote down everything I wanted to say about the research project and had enough figures (graphs/plots) to support my findings. I have two co-authors who were actively helping revise the text (English isn't my first language, so grammar can be a challenge for me sometimes -- for example, I kept using the noun "dryer" instead of the adjective "drier" when describing an environment where there is less moisture in the air). They also helped add text to certain sections where I felt they could do a better job explaining a tool we used or a specific analysis.
After months of doing research, analyzing data, making plots, discussing the results with my co-authors, writing and writing and re-writing the ideas, revising the paper multiple times, I still had to send it to a fellow scientist at my laboratory for internal review. It helps to show the completed manuscript to someone who has not been involved in the research (and hasn't been staring at the text for months) to know if what we are presenting makes sense and there are no major flaws in our science.
Our paper passed internal review with very minor revisions! Woo!
What happens now? Well, the paper will go through technical review by the publisher to make sure all their requirements have been met (did you include page numbers? are all the forms in order?), then it goes to the editor to determine appropriate reviewers for my work. For this particular journal, it's typical to get three anonymous reviewers who will provide their feedback on the manuscript. I'll have to wait for at least another month to hear back, so stay tuned for part 2!
Let me know if you have any specific questions! I left out a bunch of details, because it's honestly not that exiting of a process. Published research is used as a "currency" in science, the more papers you have the better. This can be troublesome, as not every project leads to a paper and it can encourage the end product being a published paper as opposed to science that helps society and pushes our field forward. It's funny to me that when I was in school I hated English class and now a large percentage of my job is reading endless piles of papers and writing/revising papers. It's a really tough process, but the main goal for me is to effectively communicate my research findings and tools to the community so that they can be inspired to keep investigating.
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