The 5-Part Publishability Checklist for Journal Submission (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Before you submit your paper, before you write the cover letter, before you ever click in the system submit and hope for the best, you need to answer a critical question. And that's, is your paper actually publishable? And what I mean here is not like, is it decent? Did I work really hard and pour blood, sweat, and tears into it? Did my supervisor think it's the best thing since life spread? But actually, does this paper have the essential ingredients required to be publishable? And so today what I'm going to do is give you a five-question test, and if you can answer yes to all five of these elements, then you're ready to submit. And if not, you're going to know exactly where to fix it. If you're new to the channel, I'm Professor David Stuckler, and all we focus on here is helping you publish in high-impact journals. This is a support that I wish I would have had when I was just starting out, because even though I've published 400 papers now, it wasn't always easy, and I made just about every mistake you could think of. So here on publishability, if you don't get the publishability formula right, you'll just get desk reject after desk reject, and eventually feel demoralized, and some people even go on and give up, which is just a terrible shame, because sometimes just a few tweaks can get you right back on track. So what makes a paper publishable? There's five core ingredients in our publishability formula, and if you miss one, the whole thing collapses, and your publishability is zero. So you can think of this a bit like multiplication. What we've got for our ingredients here is that publishability is a function of the gap that your paper is filling, times the value that you add to speak to that gap, times your alignment or the internal coherence of your paper, very important, times the paper's clarity, and finally times the fit with the journal that you're submitting to. And I think of this formula a bit like, again, multiplication, because if you multiply anything by zero, you can have all the other ingredients in place and score very highly, but it's still going to be zero. So you could do a paper that's internally coherent, really easy to understand and follow, even fits with the journal, but if it's not filling any gap, it's just going to be zero. That's kind of like, if you're duplicating a paper out there, well, you're not really filling any major gap. There can be some exceptions, but the value add from speaking to a gap that's zero is going to be zero, and you're just not going to be publishable. So I hope that all makes sense. Let's go through each of these ingredients in turn, and if you've been struggling with rejections, or you just want to do a quick diagnostic check of your paper, you're going to find this very helpful, and it'll help you hone in like a laser beam on which element can you maybe improve upon. And we've got dedicated training on each of these on my channel that will help you. So let's go to the first. Do you have a real gap? And when I say you have a real gap, I don't just mean here like, oh well, there's limited research. That's too vague. I want you to have crystal clear clarity on what your gap is. So there's different kinds of gaps. We've got a whole training on that, but just briefly, you might be, there's a population gap. So something's been studied in the US, but not in India. There might be something that's a missing time frame. Maybe there was some AI work that was done in 2020-2021 that just isn't recognizable today now that we're 25, 20, 26, and beyond. There could be a methodological gap. Maybe there's an innovative method that hasn't been applied that can break new ground. Maybe there's theoretical incoherence or dissonance that you want to try to resolve. Lots of different gaps, but you need to have clarity on that gap because it's the anchor for this entire publishability formula. So you should be able to state your gap in one sentence. If you can't articulate that cleanly in your cover letter, can't articulate that cleanly in your abstract, can't articulate it cleanly in your introduction, well, the reviewers aren't going to get it either. So if they don't see it, they're going to mistakenly assume it doesn't exist. And this is one of the big reasons that papers get rejected by saying not enough novelty, not enough value added. The gap is closely connected to our second component of the publishability formula. So gap alone isn't enough. It does say that, hey, there's something missing in the field, the space that I can fulfill. But your paper still has to speak to that gap. You have to deliver on it. In a way, the gap is like writing the check that your paper has to cash. Your paper has to change what we know. And you need to look at your paper and ask, if this paper disappeared tomorrow, would some knowledge disappear? I mean, we used to joke in grad school that your paper had to pass the intellectual landfill test in the sense that it had to be worth the tree that was cut down to print it. Now, a lot of journals, this was back in the day, I'm showing how ancient I am, but back in the day, a lot of papers were appearing in a physical copy of a journal. I used to read these physical copies of journals. Now it's all online. But the intellectual landfill test still stands. When you think of your value add, you need to make sure that that contribution is, you know, you want to set up your gap. Your gap might be huge. And maybe your paper can only go this far into addressing that gap. But you need to make sure that your paper actually delivers value. Because if not, your viewers are just going to say, well, there isn't really any substantive improvement here. This paper hasn't really moved us forward. It hasn't changed what we know. So take a hard look at your paper and make sure that your results, what you deliver, your conclusions have something really meaty and substantial to say directly in contact with your gap. One thing to note about your gap, just because you spot a gap doesn't mean that that's an important gap. In a way, your gap will constrain your whole paper. So for example, let's say your gap, let's use the population gap as an example. Let's say, okay, this has been amply studied in the U.S. but never been done in Nigeria. Well, that can be a gap. It's a real gap. But is that going to be valuable to a large, wide international audience? It's not to discount that what you'd be doing isn't important for Nigeria. But the problem is that big international journals, they want to hit a general readership. Something that could be, alright, even headlines in newspapers. That kind of wide readership. And they might agree with you, yeah, look, this is a real gap. It's important, but it's not important for my journal in our readership. And that's just going to get desk rejected. So when you think about your gap, if say, my gap is a population, try to pivot it into what this can speak to to a wide international audience, just as a tip. So that would be the population. Nigeria is a fascinating case study because it's a laboratory to study something new that hadn't been looked at in the U.S. and might have some broad relevance. Or if you're using a new method, you need to say, well, it's not, I got this fancy methodological gizmo. It's like, well, what is this method going to answer and speak to the gap that other methods haven't been able to achieve? So I want you to even go further on your gap. And that's going to bridge right into our value add here, which is our point two. Point number three, does your method actually answer your core research question? And look, you'd be amazed. You'd think this is kind of intuitively obvious, but a lot of papers break down here. Because maybe they've just chosen a method because it's convenient, or they had this small data set that they just happen to have already. And if somebody asks, well, why did you use this design? And your answer is, oh, well, that's just what I had data for. That's not really publishable logic. Your method should start to feel inevitable given the research question you're asking. So I've seen people try to answer questions on, you know, what's driving the rise of the far right. They were very interested in the rise of populism, and they wanted to understand populist attitudes. But then they tried to do historical archival work, which could answer part of the question, but maybe not the questions that they were asking. Or I've seen people try to understand the performance of, say, individual firms in the age of AI, but they're using big macroeconomic variables, cross-national data sets, which maybe don't speak to the causal logic they're trying to articulate. Or maybe they tried to set up their gap and value add that they were going to show causality, but then they're doing semi-structured interviews, which isn't really the best tool in the kit for that. I know this sounds obvious, but this happens all the time. So just take a quick check, hard look at your methods, and think about is it really, have you used the appropriate method? Now, whether you've implemented your method in a technically sound way, and on Quick Brush, I'm not going to be able to look at that. That's going to be for your reviewers. But I'm assuming you did. Just make sure that the methods do deliver on the research question that you set out. And point number four, clarity. You need to have some sympathy for your readers. And what I commonly see is reviewers just have to do a whole lot of work to understand what's in your head that you've dumped on paper. Remember, you've gone through a whole journey to get to the insight that you have. You need to walk your reader step by step through that journey so it becomes clear to them as well. So if your readers can't understand something, they tend to reject it. And a symptom of this is if you start getting reviews coming back saying, oh, well, the authors didn't do x, y, and z. And you're like, ah, I did do that. Well, they missed what you said. Maybe it wasn't clear, too hard to follow. And I used to get frustrated about that. And then I realized I needed to make it easier for my readers. Remember, they're very busy. They're just glancing at your paper, making a snap judgment, and trying to figure out if this passes the bar or not. So have sympathy for them. Make it easier. The way you can do this best is keep things very tidy. Make sure each paragraph makes one point. I don't want these big paragraphs smushing together huge amounts of points. It's just hard for reviewers to digest at a glance. You'll know you're getting it right if you can skip from one paragraph to each other. Just read the first sentence, the topic sentence. And you've got a linear, clear, coherent flow. There's lots of things you can do to improve clarity and lots of diagnostics for fixing clarity. I won't be able to get into it all. I've got a great writing training right up here I'd encourage you to check out. And of course, what we do inside our mentorship communities goes into more detail where we actually have editors who look at your paper and help you optimize it. But what needs to be really clear is you need to ensure that your paper's clarity. You have a structure, a backbone that enables your main results and findings to emerge and blossom. So they're very easy to spot and see. And your methods need to be written in a linear way. Your introduction needs to follow a funnel and articulate your gap and your value add. And your discussion needs to be armored up really nicely with its limitations. Those limitations framed in a way that doesn't make you look weak but shows you've done the best practices to address field specific and more general challenges. Don't hide those limitations. Lean into them and make strategic recommendations and conclusions for the future that also display and highlight that value that your paper has created. Again, not going into a little bit superficial treatment of that, but that's the kind of clarity that you need to have and it needs to be supported by a clear underlying structure. Finally, finally, finally, this one's important and that's the fit with the journal. Top two reasons for reject are not enough novelty value adds. That's speaking to our first two components of the publishability formula. The last one is the fit and that one you can modify a bit more easily by optimizing the journal you submit to. A lot of people are lost on which journal to submit to. We have an actual structured process for finding journals and make sure you don't get scam journals, which is really important as they get more sophisticated in their tactics to try to deceive you. But yeah, I mean you could do a technically perfect paper. The gap's in place. The value add is right. It's all internally aligned. The methods are sound, right? What you're saying in the introduction is lining up with the conclusion, with the methods. That's great. Structurally clear and sound. But if it's not the right journal, it's just dead on arrival. You're wasting your time. So how do you do this? Well, one indication is that you're citing papers in that journal, in your paper. That just naturally says, hey, the debate, the discussion's already happening here. It's a good fit. There's confluence. The other way you can sometimes reach out to the editors. You can see that there's special issues, papers, and calls in that journal. And look at the editorial board as well and see if they're publishing in that space. Again, these are not going to perfectly say that your paper is a great fit, but they're signs that it is a better fit. So really take a hard look at that and don't just kind of shoot in the wind and hope for the best. But follow an optimized path to get the fit right. And sometimes that means getting a specialist journal and maybe not aiming for the top of the top impact factor, but the one that really is the right fit. It's not cosmetic here. It is strategic positioning. Remember, the editors are going to answer two questions. Is this interesting to our readers? And is it in our intellectual neighborhood? It behooves you to make sure that those questions are answered for the editor very clearly, succinctly. And we also recommend in our cover letter training, making sure that that answer is front and center for the editor. So check this video on the cover letter because a lot of people feel lost with that too. Finally, as promised, the final checklist, the five-part publishability test you can run today. It's a series of yes or no questions. So one, can I state my research gap in one sentence? Be hard on yourselves here. Can you say it in one sentence? Okay, maybe max two. Can I explain my value add in one sentence? Maybe get max two. Does my paper internally align so that my method logically answers my research question, but also have alignment that my what's in my abstract fits with my method, fits with my results and conclusions? The internal alignment and the method is really synchronized well. Four, is my paper clear? That could be a little bit hard to answer, but is it very easy to spot what I did and what I found? Are the methods presented in a linear way? Do the results jump out without the reader having to do a ton of work to decipher them? If you answer no, this is a signal that your publishability is going down. And remember, if any of these is zero, the whole thing is zero. And the fifth one, can I clearly explain and articulate why this paper belongs in the specific journal I'm submitting to? Again, no to any of these. Be hard on yourself. Now you know where to focus and where the work needs, your energy needs to be channeled. You know, when I see researchers come to me with a series of desks rejects and feeling demoralized, they're often lost. They're not sure what to do. Sometimes they go do surgery to a paper and actually make it worse because they've misunderstood what is compromising the publishability of their paper. If I've done my job right, now you've got a framework to work with that knowledge is power. It's going to help you have focus on what's missing. Let me know in the comments what you think you've been missing to work on. We can help steer you to our resources and trainings here on our YouTube channel that are going to be best for you. I read and reply to every comment below. And of course, if you're interested in working together in a more structured way, joining a community of over 200 members internationally, all focused on publishing, a space where we all help each other be the best researchers we can be, check out the link below. I'd encourage you to apply, see if you're a good fit, and I'd love to see you on the inside. In the meantime, for Publishing Tactics, you're not going to want to miss this next video I've got for you.