Questions on quality of research

[trees and plants]

Hello. Questions: What should be the quality of research papers or research works and results in math or physics? I have this wrong idea that it should be equivalent or better to that of Einstein's but i think on the other hand it should not be but i do not know, i have my doubts.

So should it be at least a work equivalent in quality to that of perhaps general relativity or special relativity or not? What kind of quality should a research work have to be accepted by journals or at least to be considered of enough value? Could it be rejected from journals and still be of enough value? Could you give me some examples? What determines the acceptance of the work? Is it the scientific field? The topics? Or are these irrelevant to the enough value needed to be accepted?

If you want and can please use some links or give some examples of works that were accepted or have enough value, so that i can understand what is going on with the research works and their value and acceptance.

Thank you.

 

[Choppy]

You might find this Insights Article of interest: Guide to Publishing in Peer Reviewed Journals. I think it will answer most of your technical questions.

As to the quality... no it doesn't have to be a ground-breaking piece of work. What reviewers are generally looking for:

1. Does the work advance the field in a significant way?
   Most advancements are incremental, but to be publishable, they have to be a contribution that other researchers are able to reliably build off of. It can't be a trivial result.
2. Is the work novel?
   What they're looking for is something new to the field. Generally it can't duplicate something that's already been done, established or is a well-known or understood result. It can however duplicate something that's brand new (i.e. an independent validation of something that's still questionable or not well understood).
3. Is the work appropriate for the journal?
   Journals have specific audiences and cover very specific sub-fields. Sometimes researcher will do okay work, but for whatever reason submit it to a journal that doesn't really cover that particular topic.
4. [Edit] For got to add the quality of the scientific work.
   Maybe a no-brainer, but reviewers are also required to assess the quality of the work. Are the methods appropriate? Are the conclusions supported by the results? Are there any glaring errors? Does the work rely on uncertain assumptions? That type of thing. It doesn't need to be perfect, but you need generally at least two of your academic peers to agree that the quality of the work meets minimum standards.

And really, the best way to learn where the threshold is: read a lot of peer-reviewed papers. And talk about them with your supervisor, and your peers.