Tag: Publicity

Sanli Sanli 14 September 2008

Where to publish an article?

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Posted in Getting published, High-impact journals, Tips for junior scientists

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.

It may happen that even very experienced scientists cannot publish their article in their firstly-chosen journal. In these cases they may need to try 3 or 4 different journals, and re-format their article a couple of times. This process consumes a lot of work and energy, without adding to the scientific content. Some of this excess work could have been avoided if the first choice was made less ambitiously.