Speaker 1: Academic publishing is so very important to the progression of academics through the career ladder, but also if you have a high number of publications with a high number of citations, you can convince a governing body to give you money. And there's no doubt that if you give clever people a system to game and to hack, they will try their very best to game and hack that system. and I've read a lot about this and one thing I read recently is the publishing system, so the peer-reviewed system, is the least worst option we've got for governing scientific knowledge and peer-reviewed publications. So look, this is what we've got. So in this video, I'm going to go through the five things that they really don't want you to know about scientific publishing and academic publishing and hopefully I'll give you some tips and tricks that you haven't heard of along the way. This video is brought to you by my newsletter. Go check it out at andrewstapleton.com.au forward slash newsletter. I'll put a link in the description. But there you can get all of the insider stuff that isn't published anywhere else. I don't send it out unless I've got something valuable to share with you beyond these videos. And also, I'm working on a little bit of a secret project at the moment to help you, so you'll be the first to find out about it if you sign up to that newsletter, so go check it out. And also, I'll be doing a invite-only Q and A session very soon. Academic journals are not all the same. There is this factor called the impact factor, which means that a higher impact factor will result in your paper having a higher impact in the world. And so, it really depends on what's a good impact factor based on the field. So in material science and nanotechnology, anything over about three I was kind of happy with, that's where we're at. Whereas in other places, I know my hardcore physics friends, their impact factors sometimes are as low as one or lower. So it doesn't matter really, it's very field specific, but you are always aiming for the highest impact factor journal possible. Now, when you've got a bit of pressure on you to publish, it's very easy to kind of go with whoever will accept you. You just want the path of least resistance. And that is where predatory journals can kind of launch in and jump out of the woodwork. And that's because the predatory journals want money to publish your work and they will do a very poor job at peer reviewing your stuff. So essentially pay money, get it published, done, move on. and predatory journals often sort of email me even now. They're like, oh, esteemed Professor Stapleton, please publish in our, and I'm like, no, the more esteemed I am, especially after I've been out of academia for a number of years now, the more predatory and scammy you are. So yes, it all comes down to money ultimately because journals are amazing business models. Get this, the scientists do the work, they publish their peer-reviewed paper in a journal, so they do all the writing, they do all the work, then other scientists peer-review it for free, they don't get paid, for free, and then they report back to the journal and say, yes, this is good, no, this isn't good, and then there's an editor that sometimes is also a scientist who is not getting paid, they're just doing it because it looks good on their CV, They're not immune to that carrot either. And then they also charge people to read that paper. So they have people doing work for them for free to produce their product, and then they're selling it at an extortionate price. And also, if you want to publish in open science journals, so that's where anyone can access the science for free, some of the fees are like $5,000 plus. So that is an incredible business model and with that amount of money freely floating around in the academic world, there is gonna be sharks out there willing to snap up what they can. So predatory journals are a thing. And if you do publish in predatory journals, it can actually impact your scientific career a little bit because ultimately you look at your citation list when you apply for a job or a postdoc and they go, oh, that is not a good journal. You know, you've got to have what I think was called top quarter or A plus journals when I was in science. So really you want to be in the really top end journals and the way you can check this, there is a website called thinkchecksubmit.org and there they'll talk you through actually just how you publish in good journals, how you make sure you steer clear of journals that could harm your reputation in the future. And yes, so predatory journals, and the journal and business model is just insane. I'm amazed they can get away with it, to be honest. The second thing that I think you should know about publishing in the peer-reviewed literature is that getting a big old fat name on your paper really helps. Now, in the battery field, when I was doing some sort of electrode, transparent electrode stuff, I saw this name coming up over and over and over again. And that was because this person had produced, you know, a relatively early paper that was just so influential in the field that they were able to just collaborate with anyone because everyone wanted to collaborate with them. and then the editors of the journals recognize their name, it's like, oh my God, this person's awesome, they're like a science superstar, of course we're going to publish this paper because everyone's going to want to read it. And once they get that reputation, essentially they just have to like nod and they can collaborate with someone, they're like, I want to collaborate with you, and then they do all the work and they just get their names on papers. So there is sort of a celebrity status, if you will, that you can build up in the academic world. And you know, I look at these people that have managed to do this, and they produce, oh, tens of like, you know, 50, 60 papers a year, and you're like, clearly, this person is not able to look over all of that science and all of that stuff. You know, one a week? Are you insane? Clearly, all they're doing is passing an editorial eye over the if, you know, if that, over the paper, and then going, yes, this is good enough. And then they can get it into higher impact factor journals. You can get it into the natures, into the sciences, into the PNAS. So, you know, the big names do make a huge difference and it's an unfortunate reality of academic publishing. The third thing that I think you should know is that there is an unspoken rule about author order. And you can look at sort of who's contributed what and the most just by decoding this little kind of thing. So the first and last positions the most important. The first position on an order of authors means that this person has been able to do the majority of the work. They've probably written the majority of the paper and really it is their project that they're reporting on. So this person clearly deserves first position. The last author is normally the person with the money or their supervisor. And this person can have a whole range of influences on that paper. Sometimes they do nothing other than provide the money, get the grant money, and give access to the lab. Now that's very important. The science couldn't have been done without it, but this end position often correlates with the corresponding author, which means that they are responsible for just making sure that all of the authors have actually contributed to the paper. The corresponding author is also kind of, you know, a bit of kudos if you're the corresponding author. I think I was corresponding author on one or two of my papers, but to be honest, it doesn't really matter. You just have a little star next to your name and it's corresponding author. That's fine. Now the middle bit is where the kind of jostling happens between academics. Right bang in the middle is the person that has contributed the least or has contributed, you know, the same as everyone else but they are less forceful than other people. I've seen people argue about being bumped up one or two positions in the author order. One of my papers had 11 authors and I can assure you that the majority of the people didn't do very much and I was just, it was like, oh, I want to go in front of this person and you know, that is how it happens. So there are sort of egos at play when you're trying to work out the author order on a paper and the first and last position are absolutely the most important for everyone and it's pretty obvious who should go there, but everything else, you just don't want to be smack bang in the middle because it means you've done the least and then out from that gets sort of like more prestigious and more prestigious. And look, in the past I've been like sure, put me in the middle position. I mean, I did like one or two experiments for you and thanks very much, you know, that's fine. So yeah, author order, there is a huge amount of thought and arguments that happen to work out that order. So the fourth thing is that a lot of people use citation metrics to artificially boost their H-index. And the H-index is essentially how many papers you've got with that many number of citations. the higher your H-index, the better scientist apparently you are, and here's the thing, is that you can actually artificially inflate that a little bit by self-citing. So when you create a paper, you just reference all your other papers, and that counts as a cite. And so you can bump up your H-index relatively easily. But self-citation isn't necessarily a bad thing. You know, if what you're talking about in your current paper is reasonably sort of close to what you've done in the past, of course you're going to sort of reference your old stuff. But it's when people are just squeezing in everything, you know, that they can't, it's kind of a tenuous link and they can't make an absolute sort of direct connection is where it gets a little bit fuzzy. But the biggest problem with the citation hacking is when the paper goes to peer review and the peer reviewer goes, I will only accept this paper if they reference these things. And I've had it so many times, this is so common in the academic publishing world, is that I've sent off a paper and it's come back and it's like, yes, well, they've completely forgot to cite these very important papers, and you look at them, and if they're not all of theirs, which I've seen do, that's brazen, isn't it, just to send papers with your name on it, but the majority of them are part of their research group, and you're like, fine, because I want this paper published, I will do it, and I've had up to 20 extra references with their names on it, and I've bloody done it because it's just not worth the fight. You know, if you look at risk and reward, the risk is, well, really nothing because I'm just going to put on an extra 20 thing, but the reward is I just get this paper published as quickly as possible and I can move on to the next one. So that happens a lot, and I think that form of it is particularly common, and it's particularly kind of seedy and sinister. The fifth thing about academic publishing that you need to know and they don't want you to know is that it is incredibly political. Now we've talked about how if you get a big name, like a scientific celebrity on your paper, you can shoot for the stars and you can get in the natures and the sciences and in your field you'll have these papers that you're like, I definitely want to publish in that paper. But if you build relationships with editors, you can actually sort of artificially boost your science just by them knowing you a little bit. Now here's an example is I sent off a peer-reviewed paper to a journal editor and these editors are the gatekeepers for the peer review process. So they get it, they scan it and they go yes or no and if it's a no, they just send it back and you know, you feel disappointed but you move on to the next one. But if you've got a good relationship with the editor, with the research team that they're on, with the university that they're working for, you can actually just write an email back and be like, no, I don't accept that decision. And it happened to me. I sent a thing off and my supervisor at the time had a relationship with the editor, you know, only a very sort of like a loose one, but essentially said, well, I'd like for you to reconsider considering our ongoing relationship with this institution and blah, blah, blah. And I read the email, I was like, oh, okay, okay, okay, it's kind of like a little bit of a high pressure email. And yes, there we go, it got through to peer review. Because also the editor is normally a researcher who is very busy and they're like, oh, this person, okay, fine, let's just send it out to peer review and other people can tell me it's a rubbish paper or not. But it ended up being a good paper and we got in. So it is so much more political and relationship-based than probably objective science should be. And of course, once it gets to peer review, that's when you hope the majority of the gatekeeping has been correct. But I am sure there are plenty of good papers that don't get to peer review because the editor just, I don't know, maybe is having a bad day. And so it's so political, it's so sort of like subjective in that first kind of interaction with the journal, that it is just a little bit of a lottery. One of my research friends says if your paper is not getting rejected, I think he said 80 to 90% of the time, you're not aiming high enough. Now that comes from a position of someone who's in a permanent academic position, so there's a lot of privilege there. They can wait for this paper to bounce around all these different journals. If you're an early career researcher, you don't have the time, so there is a higher pressure just to publish, publish, publish, get it into a journal and move on. So yeah, build relationships, you know, ask your supervisor if they've got a personal connection to other editors that are working in higher impact factor journals and you know, a carefully worded email can get you through that gatekeeper to the peer review process. And then they'll send you back someone and say, cite all my work and you will, and then you'll get it published and you'll be a science superstar. So there we have it. There is the dark side of the academic publishing world. Let me know in the comments what you would add to that and I will see you in the next video.