How can I choose ahead of time where my research should be published?

Question

Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published states:

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

This sounds like very good advice, not just because you would pace out the act of writing your paper over the entire duration of your research, but it would also help you stay focused and keep track of your progress.

However, in practice, how is this possible? To start writing a paper, I must first know what format and style it should be written in. To know that, I would consult the guidelines of the journal in which I want publish. But the choice of journal depends on the quality of the research and notability of findings. But if I start writing on the day that I start my research, how can I know what journal the research will be good enough for?

For instance, if I shoot high and assume I am going to have a Nature paper, what do I do if a year down the line, it turns out that I was unable to succeed in reaching my goals and Nature would not possibly accept my research? Now I have to rewrite from scratch for another journal, and the time I spent slowly building up my Nature manuscript is wasted. I might as well have focused on research only at first, and left the writing part for last.

What journal's submission guidelines do I pick to follow this Rule 7? The most prestigious journal? The humblest journal? Some generic set of guidelines for "no journal"?

Rule 9 from the same text says:

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

But how can you know ahead of time where you will be able to publish, especially if you don't have much experience publishing?

Answer 1

• Format and style should rarely, if ever, be your first concern in writing a paper. Your top objective should be describing good research to your readers. You need not worry about how to cite a paper or if you should use British or American English spellings at first. (Or at least not until you complete Rule 9!)

  Instead, what this is rule is advising you to do are tasks such as organizing your thoughts, collect references, write up your methodologies, and think about the graphics you will want to use to help illustrate your points. This is more or less the same advice given by people like George Whitesides in talks and as a "editorial column."

• Knowing where to publish is not that difficult. Look for where the work you're drawing from is currently being published. If many of the papers you are citing are from journals X and Y, one of those will likely be a good home for your paper. Which one to select might be a matter of which audience you're trying to reach: for instance, The Journal of Physical Chemistry and The Journal of Chemical Physics cover very similar sets of areas. However, the former journal is mainly a chemistry journal, and the latter is primarily for physicists. (There is, as you might imagine, a lot of crossover.)

Answer 2

I was provided this advice by a few successful professors (in computer science): keep a track for a "small pond" and a track for a "big pond". A small pond is a yearly conference that has a pretty small community, is reasonably specialized in its area, and is often accessible as far as acceptance rate goes. Every year, you should aim to have a paper here and get known in the community over time. A big pond is a yearly conference that is large, has good impact and reputation, and is more general to the field rather than to your specialization. Again, aim for this conference every year, but keep in mind that because it's bigger and more prestigious, it's also more difficult to get in.

What ends up happening is that, almost by default, you get at least two yearly targets for publishing - and as a result you know where you're writing every year.

This advice isn't exactly the same when it comes to journal writing, but the general principle can still apply. Pick a couple of journals that are well-known in your field: a specialized one and a more general one, and use them as your main targets.

How do you select targets? Well, as suggested, the places that you cite are pretty good places to go to. Your advisor is likely to have a few favorite publication venues (and it's usually a good idea to publish with your advisor). When you read and write often, you will start recognizing which journals and conferences have respected papers in them, and what the bar is for getting accepted is.

Overall: start writing early. Research questions, for example, are generally going to be similar no matter what venue you submit to. Your methods are not going to change based on the venue you write for. Your results are not going to change based on the venue you write for. It's safe to write these things down early.

What does change with venue is the style guidelines (easy enough to just use a new LaTeX or Word template, or even to copy and paste) and the audience (mostly with respect to Introduction/Motivation and Implications/Discussion of results). It's important to choose the venue for these reasons - I personally consider it a bad idea to not customize the intro and the discussion sections to tailor it toward what a particular community expects.

Answer 3

A good indicator of where to publish and who is more likely to publish your work is to look at your citations. Its a good bet that a journal that you cite heavily has an audience interested in your work.

As far as having an adaptable, journal independent formatting for your paper, you may want to write your paper in LaTeX. You can easily switch formats by changing the .sty files particular your journal of interest. These usually include predefined reference templates so that you can simply include a separate .bib file with your reference information and the necessary formatting will be automatically be generated.

Answer 4

I write while I do the research, but I don't attempt to write the text of the journal paper from the get-go. What I write at the start is essentially a set of research notes, which often gradually evolves into a lengthy technical report. The journal article is written by extracting the most valuable and interesting parts of the report and adding some expository elements (introduction and transitions).

It's possible and sometimes worthwhile to "publish" the technical report as well, for instance on the arXiv or sometimes in an institutional series. In that case you may want to spend more time polishing the report itself. Here's an example of a 47-page report that's much too long for a journal article -- at least, for most journals in my field.

Sometimes it makes sense to submit all or most of the report to a journal with no page limits; for instance, this lengthy report will soon appear in the LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics.

As Pete Clark says in the comments, I find that the most valuable effect of writing as I go is that writing things down carefully clarifies my own understanding.