How to Publish Your Research? Flashcards
TEAM Effort:
- Author
- Editorial Office
- Reviewer
- > Submission, Editorial screening, reviewing and editorial decision processing
Academic success depends chiefly on:
1) Getting published -> competence-based abilities, careful research and preparation of the manuscript, compulsivity, perseverance, some luck
2) Getting cited -> informative and memorable title, abstract must contain key “bottom line” or “take-away points”, co-author outputs tend to generate more citations due to networking effects between authors in a given research team, lab.
H-Index:
- Characteristics -> increase over time, based on citation count, linear relationship between value of h-index and time
Guidelines for preparing reports:
- Description -> basic details of study (gender, race, etc)
- Explanation -> Presenting the rationale of several facets of the study.
- Contextualization -> How the study fits the context of other studies and in the knowledge base more generally
+ Thematic line
Manuscript structure:
1) Abstract
2) Introduction
3) Body of Article
4) Results
5) Discussion and Conclusion
6) Acknowledgements
7) References
8) Figures and Tables
Abstract:
- Critical section because:
- Read by more people than the article is
- It is the first impression of the article
- Purpose -> provide brief statement of purpose, methods, findings, and conclusion of the study.
Introduction:
- What is the overall rationale and objective of the research?
- Why this particular study is needed?
- Do not review literature by literature, but rather convey issues and evaluate comments that set the stage for the study
- CONTEXTUALIZATION (clarification of broader context, why the study is important, limitations of previous work, new dimensions to advance theory)
- Move from very general to specific
- Identify the gap/hiatus that the study is designed to fill
- Broad information on topic
- Previous research
- Narrower background information
- Need for study
- Focus of paper
- Hypothesis
- Summary of problem (selling point)
- Overall 300-500 word
Methods:
- Who was studied, why, how, and so on
- Describe critical procedural AND provides the rationale for methodological decisions and for the sample
- Participants are described here (age, gender, etc)
- The operationalization of constructs should be presented here with their psychometric characteristics
- The rationale of the authors decision ought to be explicit (just like in the other sections)
- Provides instruction on exactly how to repeat experiment/study
- Subjects
- Sample preparation techniques
- Sample origins
- Field site description
- Data collection protocol
- Data analysis techniques
- Any computer programs used
- Description of equipment and its use
Results:
- Is important to convey why specific tests were selected, and how these tests serve the goals of the study
- Useful to retain the order of hypotheses when the statistics are presented
- The statistics are only tools in the service of the hypotheses
- Useful to begin by presenting basic descriptors of the data(mean, std, etc.)
- From standpoint of the reader, results should make clear what the main hypotheses were, how the analysis provide appropriate tests and what conclusions can be reached as a result
- Objective presentation of experiment results
- Summary of data
- NOT a Discussion!
- Common mistakes –> Raw data – Redundancy – Discussion and interpretation of data – No figures or tables – Methods/materials reported
Discussion:
- Consists of the conclusions and interpretations of the study
- Includes -> overview of major findings, integration or relation of these findings to theory and prior research, limitations and ambiguities and their implications for interpretation, and future directions.
- Interpret results –> Did the study confirm/deny the hypothesis? – If not, did the results provide an alternative hypothesis?
- What interpretation can be made?
- Do results agree with other research?
- Sources of error/anomalous data?
- Implications of study for field
- Suggestions for improvement and future research?
- Relate to previous research
Figures and Tables:
- TABLE ->Presents lists of numbers/text in columns
- Figures -> Visual representation of results or illustration of concept/methods
- IMPORTANT: Tables and Figures should be integral to the text, but should be designed so that they can be understood in isolation.
References:
- Check specific referencing style of journal
- Should reference -> peer-reviewed journal articles, abstracts, books
Should also reference -> non-peer-reviewed works, textbooks, personal communications - Common mistake (format, format, format)
- Redundant information -> text, figures, tables, captions
What is Peer-reviewed:
- Reviewed process for scientists by scientists
- Purpose = filter what is published as “science/research”, to provide researchers with perspective
- Where is it used? Scientific publication, grant view
Constraints of peer-review:
- Slow
- Conflict views (conflicting theory bias)
- Personal views (objective vs personal edit)
- Fraud (data manipulation and invention)
“The Seven Deadly Sins”:
1) Data manipulation, falsification
2) Duplicate manuscripts
3) Redundant publication
4) Plagiarism
5) Author conflicts of interest
6) Animal use concerns
7) Humans use concerns
Plagiarism and self-plagiarism:
- Each time you paraphrase or quote another author you must credits the source in the text
- Each sentence with paraphrase must have citation
- Self-plagiarism is reusing your own work by passing it off as new scholarship. You must cite yourself.
What constitutes redundant publication?
- Data in conference abstract? NO
- Same data, different journal? YES
- Data on website? MAYBE
- Data included in review article? OK IF LATER
- Expansion of published data set? YES
What makes a good research paper?
- Good science
- Good writing
- Publication in good journals
What constitutes good research?
- NOVEL - new and not resembling something formerly known or used
- MECHANISTIC - testing a hypothesis - determining the fundamental processes involved in or responsible for an action, reaction, or other natural phenomena
- DESCRIPTIVE - describes how things are but does not test how things work - hypothesis is not tested
What constitutes a good journal?
- Impact factor - average number of times published papers are cited up to two years after publication
- Immediacy index - average number of times published paper are cited during year of publication
Impact factor (IF):
- The average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during two preceding years. Measures the quality of academic journals.
Immediacy index (I):
- Is measure of how quickly the average articles in a journal get cited
Process of Research:
1) Completion of Research
2) Preparation of manuscript
3) submission of manuscript
4) assignment and review
5) decision (Rejection=back to 1, or revision -> resubmission -> re-review ->rejection =back to 1, or Acceptance -> publication
