One writes a scientific article when she thinks she has enough new material in which a sizable fraction of the community is interested. In the time of writing, any article should be written with a lot of enthusiasm, as if it is going to appear on the cover of the most cited journal in the field. But sooner or later, one should decide about the submission destination.

Choosing the journal where you want to publish your article is a very nontrivial task. Frankly speaking, my mind gets occupied with this question, from a very early stage. It may be partly due to my lack of experience or because of my light-weighted publication list.

Not only the scientific glossy magazines but also the professional journals are invaded by the colorful graphs that either look like an artificially colored moon landscape, or like a collection of candy sticks or like a flying carpet. I do not like them and in particular the candy sticks I find ugly.

In physics and mathematics progress is made by generalizing and abstracting. The ultimate result is the capturing of one’s finding in a mathematical formula or an - admittedly dull - scientific X-Y graph. As a result physics papers were are full of these terrifying items. I say were, as the X-Y plot is on its way out.

Is it true that articles in high-impact journals involve, in average, more coauthors?

A while ago, I was involved in writing a review article, which finally included around 270 references. Being not very experienced in using BibTeX, I had to manually enter many references in my TeX-file. There I noticed that Nature and Science entries took more time to handle because they usually come with more than 4 coauthors.

Ideal

Scientists that have made observations, or have obtained their results from a calculation or a simulation want to present these findings in a figure. If you are an old-fashioned scientist you use as format a dull plot with a labeled x-axis and a labeled y-axis and a curve mapping points on these axes. If you are a young guy or girl you spicy your paper up by presenting your data in fantastically shining 3D plot (from which it is always quite difficult to extract the quantitative information contained in the plot) . Usually the labels are scaled in such a way that they show cosmetically appealing numbers like 0, 1, 2. If the labels would contain numbers like 0.645 x 10^-3 we scale the axes and report in the caption what the scaling factor is. In such a way anybody that checks the figure gets all information and could - if needed - repeat the experiment or the calculation and check his graph against the published graph.