Speaker 1: The first thing you need if you want to publish a research paper in the peer-reviewed literature is obviously a research paper, but that paper needs to be new, novel, and interesting. You need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say something along the lines of, this is the first time that we have shown, and then something new and novel. You need to be able to do that with a straight face, because let me tell you, there's loads of marketing in this, and also I know people that just outright lie. I don't outright lie, but it is an important part of the process to be able to convince another person that this is something the world needs to know about. Once you've got your peer-reviewed paper, and if you're not sure how to write a peer-reviewed paper, go check out my channel, because I've got loads of videos about writing a peer-reviewed paper for publication and getting it to that standard that's ready for submission. This video is going to go through all of the submission process. Once you've got an abstract and an introduction, you can head over to something like this. This is the Elsevier Journal Finder, and there's loads of them from different publishers. They want your money. You'll see in a minute what I mean, but here you put your abstract, or you can search by keywords. I did this for one of my papers that I've published. This is my electrode from silver nanowires and carbon nanotube paper, and you can see that I've got 40 journals matching your paper, and then you've got all of these filters down here. You've got whether or not it's open access, whether or not it's journals that you need a subscription for. You've also got the site score, time to first decision, which is important if you want something published quickly. Impact factor is so important. You want to get into the highest impact factor journal possible, which means sometimes that you aim really high, up into the sky, one that you know you won't be able to reach, and then you work your way down until it finds its home. That's what one of my past supervisors used to say, and also time to publication. Once again, that's very important because you don't want this dragging on for years, but this is the sort of journals that it's recommended. First one, carbon, site score 20.1. I think that's the average citation that their papers get, and also impact factor 10.9. 10.9 for me would be amazing in my field, but let's cut to the chase, and this is what they're really interested in selling you, is this open access charge. You pay money as a publisher, after doing all of the work to them, to host it on their website, which is such a scam. Go check out my other video where I talk about Wiley being a massive scam, in my opinion. Talking about Wiley, here it is. They've got another one, another sort of journal finder, so here you can go in, you put in your manuscript title, your manuscript abstract, and I did that here, and you can see ... Oh, sorry. They are a billion dollar company off the back of scientists doing work for free, and here it says, sorry, we're unable to generate any results to find relevant journals. You can go to ... Oh, that was so bad. Okay, come on, Wiley. You can do better than that. Oh, there we are. Now we're in. Now we're working. Advanced functional materials is definitely one that I would try to publish in in the past. You've got small advanced materials. All of these are way more exciting to me than the ones that Journal Finder found from Elsevier, so I love all of these, and once again, look, Impact Factor 19, amazing. There's no way I'm getting into that with this paper, but we can go down the list and sort of see where our paper may fit, and also you can go to your supervisor with all of these and say, look, I've used the Journal Finder on Wiley, and these are some places that I think that it can fit. They all want your money, so they all provide them. Here's another one from MDPI, and here's another one from SpringerLink. SpringerLink doesn't do the ad abstract anymore. You just search for keywords, but it is the perfect way to find journals to put your paper into. Now, you can also just ask your supervisor. Your supervisor has been around for so many years. They're old and crusty, and the thing is, they've got like a sixth sense as to the quality of a paper and where it's likely to get published. They've also got connections in different publishing fields to editors, which means that sometimes your paper can get an easier ride to acceptance. More on that in a minute. The next thing you need to do when you're submitting a paper to a journal is avoid desk rejections. Desk rejections is when an editor receives a paper, scans it for like 20 seconds, and goes, no, this isn't for my journal, but this is where you need to sort of like turn on the marketing side of your brand. Do you remember that thing we talked about right up front? It was all about making sure you can look yourself in the mirror and say something along the lines of, this is the first time that we have shown something. You need to sort of like show the editor that that is the angle you're taking, and you need obviously the evidence to back that up, but importantly, that needs to go up the front. In any conversation you have with them, they need to see immediately what the value is of this paper and why they should be the people publishing it. There's a few ways that you can avoid desk rejections just beyond just stating what your paper is. The first one is connections. Now, I have had a desk rejection. My supervisor got in contact with them and said, oh, I have been collaborating with your institute for a while, and surprise, surprise, the paper got accepted. So sometimes in academia, it's not what you know, it's definitely who you know. Arguably, that one matters more. So when you go to conferences, when you meet people, when editors come to your institutions, make sure you speak to them, make sure you start to build a little bit of a relationship with them so that when you get to that point where you're ready to publish, they know you. You're a known entity, and also having sort of like big names on your papers, ones that people know, like, and trust is just a way of getting a paper through immediately. So if you do have to put that crusty old academic on your paper as a named researcher, even though they've done nothing, sometimes your paper will get through quicker. Now, that is unethical, but it happens, and it's a tool you could potentially use. If you're lucky, the editor will send your paper out to reviewers. Now, reviewing is done by other scientists in the field, and depending on your field, it depends whether or not your paper is going to get an easy ride. In my field, it was pretty good. If you showed some data and you sort of backed it up with sort of rigorous understanding and analysis of that data, then it mostly went through. There'd be some sort of like gnarky comments and stuff like that, but ultimately, snarky? Yes, snarky comments, but ultimately it got through, whereas in other smaller fields, there can be much more infighting. Now, when reviewers give you your comments back, it may take a month, it may take three months, but ultimately what you need to do is just do what they ask, and that is obviously within a certain limit. If they're asking you to do something unethical or they're asking you for an experiment that just doesn't match, you can say, no, I'm not going to do that, but in my experience, it is easy just to sort of like bow your head and say, yes, reviewer two, you are God to me. I will do anything you want, but obviously, that comes at a cost because sometimes they ask for you to cite their papers because citations matter in academia to boost your H index so that you can get more grants and funding in the future. So they ask for you to cite things. If it's reasonable, just cite it. That is the one thing. I tried to fight this for years and I was like, no, I am not citing your paper, but unfortunately, it just is a wasted amount of energy that then you could sort of like use elsewhere on something more productive, like going to, where were we, like just doing your hobbies, just doing that. So just do what they want within reason. Don't argue too much. I used to put people in, put the references to their papers in. I used to make little changes, their suggestions, and always in the responses, I would say, oh, I wouldn't go, oh, that's a bit creepy, but I'd be like, this is a great suggestion by reviewer two. It really helps enhance the quality of the paper and we thank the reviewer for their in-depth analysis, blah, whatever, whatever, whatever. Just make them feel good because then it's much more likely to get published because the editor will see that you've addressed the reviewer's comments, that you've done everything really they've wanted because if you start arguing, the editor has to send it like out to the reviewer again. It just starts this whole process. It drags on forever and in academia, if you want your career to progress quickly, it's all about making sure that you publish quickly as well. So go through the process and don't argue too much unless, of course, it's absolutely outrageous what they're asking for. If you've got to this step, congratulations. This is such a great feeling in academia. For me, I never really got that amazing energy because at this point in the process, I was always just exhausted by the paperwork, by having to appease everyone. And so at this point, congratulations. Some people that I know, some academics love this point where they get back the copy edit, where it's all nice and formatted by the journal. Arguably, this is what they do for their money is they go to Word and put it in columns. That was a little bit rude, wasn't it? But they put it in nice columns. They put in your figures. It looks nice. It looks professional. You can tick a box and say, yes, this is it. But in this copy edit stage, I would recommend going through, read it properly, send it to a couple of people, look at the figures. Are they clear? Are the figures understandable? And here is one of the biggest things. If your figures do not work in just black and white because a lot of people print off their stuff in black and white, consider changing the figures a little bit, i.e. making sure that if you've got a graph, it's dotted lines instead of colored lines. That sort of stuff really does help people in the future. Cite your paper. Make it easy for them. If you do have color, make sure that it also works in black and white. Go print it off in a black and white printer. Have a color copy as well. But ultimately, those are the things you're looking for in that copy edit. Then you send it back to the journal and say, yes, I love this. Thank you so much. And you're done and dusted, champion. And then you do that over and over again for the rest of your career. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about the publishing scandal that's happening right now and why academia is broken.