Life cycle of a scientific paper

So you wrote a scientific paper. Great job, but what's next? In this topic, we will discuss the life cycle of a paper, from Google Doc to published article in a good journal.

Scientific journals

We have already discussed what a scientific article is (learn this in the topic Scientific articles). If you want other scientists to use your scientific knowledge, the article must be published. Choosing the scientific journal in which the article will be published is a very important step.

There are many scientific publishers and journals in every field and sub-field imaginable. Pay close attention to the subject of the journal, if there is one (for example, the journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta publishes only articles related to biochemistry and biophysics). It is also important how "respected" the journal is in the scientific community — we will talk about its "weight" a little later.

Before being published in a good journal, an article goes through a process called review, during which the work presented is examined to ensure its authenticity and veracity. Until an article passes the review process, its results will not be regarded as true by the scientific community, even if it is widely available online. Therefore, scientific articles are published only in scientific journals — unfortunately, an article on Reddit is not scientific, even if it is written and formatted like a scientific paper.

Peer review

So, you chose the journal for your paper. You submit your article online, and it goes first to an editor who decides if it fits the content area of the journal and is worth sending it for review. The editor will find several experts in that field of science, who will carefully read the article, looking for inconsistencies and weaknesses and noticing what can be improved. There are certain rules by which an expert is selected. Firstly, the expert and the authors of the article should not be professionally related to each other (for example, they should not work in the same lab), so that there is no conflict of interest. Secondly, the expert must be recognized in the field, that is, have their own scientific publications and have earned their Ph.D. Naturally, peer review must be blind, meaning the authors do not know who reviewed the article. Some publishers practice double-blind review, in which the author does not know who is reviewing their article, and the reviewer does not know whose work they are reading.

There are also rules for reviewing. Reviewers are supposed to read carefully and write up their review containing:

1. Complete analysis of the text.
2. Evaluation of the experiments on which the authors based their conclusions.
3. Assessment of how new and important the results are (very few journals, for instance, will accept for publication a paper in which it is proved that the water molecule consists of oxygen and hydrogen, even though that it is true).
4. Analysis of how well the article is written and the data is presented (read about the rules for writing an article in the Scientific Articles topic).
5. General subjective assessment and recommendation for acceptance or rejection of the article for publication in the journal.

Specific rules for writing reviews differ from journal to journal, but commonly the review is written in the same scientific style as the article.

Citation index

You carefully studied the review and took into account all the comments. Your article has become brilliant and the magazine has finally published it. What is next?

Now your data can be used by other scientists. When published, your article receives a unique number (Digital Object Identifier — DOI), under which it enters the global databases of scientific publications. If other scientists refer to your article in their work, then your citation index increases. The citation index is one of the most commonly used scientometric indicators.

The most popular citation index is the h-index, named after physicist Jorge Hirsch. The h-index is the maximum number of papers (h) that have that same number (h) of citations. That is, if an author has 10 articles, 5 of which have 10 or more citations, and 5 of which have 1 citation each, their h-index is 5. 5 of their papers have 5 or more citations.

Citation indexes are often criticized. Firstly, they often only reflect the field's interest in a topic rather than the quality of the article (if a topic has become popular, articles on it are more often cited), which can result in a situation where great scientists do not have a high h-index because their topic is too unpopular or complex. Secondly, there is the problem of self-citation, when a group of scientists refers to their own earlier published publications in a new paper. Despite this, h-index correlates with obvious success indicators, such as the Nobel Prize.

"Weight" of the journal

All scientific journals are included in a unified system of scientific knowledge. There are a large number of international citation systems: Web of Science, Scopus, Web of Knowledge, and so on. The most authoritative of the existing international citation systems, whose indices are recognized all over the world, are Web of Science and Scopus.

When choosing a journal, you need to pay attention to its "weight," and make sure the magnitude of your paper matches the magnitude of the journal you are submitting it to. This takes into account several factors:

The Journal Impact Factor shows the average number of citations received by each article published in that journal in the two years prior to when the Impact Factor was reported. This shows how interesting and useful the articles of the journal are to the scientific community.

IPP — Impact Per Publication — indicates the average number of citations per article published in the journal. To calculate this, one tabulates all the citations from all papers published by that journal in the previous three years and divides that by the total number of articles.

SNIP — Source Normalized Impact Per Paper — is a normalized journal citation score used by the Scopus database. SNIP takes into account the level of citations in each scientific field, which makes it possible to compare journals — this can be very useful.

Conclusion

To be a scientific article, a paper must be published in a scientific journal. Before publication, the journal invites one or more experts to review the article. The author uses the feedback from the reviewer to improve any shortcomings in their paper, and then the article is published. When publishing, an article is assigned a DOI number and added to international citation systems, and your citation index will grow as other scientists use your article. The most popular citation index is the h-index. There are many international citation systems, and there are analogs of a citation index for journals, such as IPP and SNIP.