Ten simple rules for getting your research report published

These ten simple rules can help you leave behind something future generations of scientists will admire. When you are long gone, your scientific legacy is, in large part, the literature you left behind and the impact it represents.

Rule 1: Read many papers, and learn from both the good and the bad work of others.

Rule 2: The more objective you can be about your work, the better that work will ultimately become.

Rule 3: Good editors and reviewers will be objective about your work.

Rule 4: If you do not write well in the English language, take lessons early; it will be invaluable later.

Rule 5: Learn to live with rejection.

Rule 6: The ingredients of good science are obvious—novelty of research topic, comprehensive coverage of the relevant literature, good data, good analysis including strong statistical support, and a thought-provoking discussion. The ingredients of good science reporting are obvious— good organization, the appropriate use of tables and figures, the right length, writing to the intended audience—do not ignore the obvious.

Rule 7: Start writing the paper the day you have the idea of what questions to pursue.

Rule 8: Become a reviewer early in your career.

Rule 9: Decide early on where to try to publish your paper.

Rule 10: Quality is everything: It is better to publish one paper in a quality journal than multiple papers in lesser journals. Increasingly, it is harder to hide the impact of your papers; tools like Google Scholar and the ISI Web of Science are being used by tenure committees and employers to define metrics for the quality of your work. It used to be that just the journal name was used as a metric. In the digital world, everyone knows if a paper has little impact. Try to publish in journals that have high impact factors; chances are your paper will have high impact, too, if accepted. However, a proper selection of the journal based on the scope and not impact factor should be the major criterion to publish new advances in science.

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Answers extracted from:

1. Bourne PE (2005) Ten simple rules for getting published. PLoS Comput Biol 1: e57

2. Prashant V. Kamat (Editor-in-Chief, ACS Energy Letters). Most Cited versus Uncited Papers. What Do They Tell Us? ACS Energy Lett., 2018, 3 (9), pp 2134–2135.

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