What's the Process for Publishing Scientific Papers?

[John37309]

Gentlemen, (and Ladies if there are any reading this)
I will remember where i got help when i asked for help. And everyone here has helped me and offered me good advice. When i publish my paper, i will come back and update this thread or maybe start a fresh thread for a bit of community peer-review and feedback. I promise!

Anyway i have a few other bits and pieces to chat about but i will start threads in the appropriate forum section when i get time.

Guys its good to talk openly about the scientific publishing process. And how people can overcome any difficulty they have with publishing. The system should be open to everyone, not just academics who do scientific studies for a living. Science is for everyone, not just the elite.

John.

 

[JaredJames]

Guys its good to talk openly about the scientific publishing process. And how people can overcome any difficulty they have with publishing. The system should be open to everyone, not just academics who do scientific studies for a living. Science is for everyone, not just the elite.

Science is open to everyone, but you have to realize that the current state of things means it just isn't within the scope of the average joe.

The current checks and balances are there to ensure people aren't just barreling in and repeating / producing flawed work.

As long as you follow scientific method and you are sure of your subject matter, getting it to other people to check is easy and then you're away, qualifications or not.

They key thing to realize is that the chances of someone without qualifications in the subject (or at least no formal training) coming up with a major breakthrough are slim to none. Don't confuse the scientists of years ago with those of today. Things are very different.

Again, we would all really appreciate you linking to the work and I hope you do so in good time.

 

[John37309]

Science is open to everyone, but you have to realize that the current state of things means it just isn't within the scope of the average joe.

The current checks and balances are there to ensure people aren't just barreling in and repeating / producing flawed work.

As long as you follow scientific method and you are sure of your subject matter, getting it to other people to check is easy and then you're away, qualifications or not.

They key thing to realize is that the chances of someone without qualifications in the subject (or at least no formal training) coming up with a major breakthrough are slim to none. Don't confuse the scientists of years ago with those of today. Things are very different.

Again, we would all really appreciate you linking to the work and I hope you do so in good time.

Yep, thanks for your help Jared. I will let you guys know in the next month or 2 once I'm ready. I will give you guys a link.

As i mentioned, you might generalise by saying that some of the top work is done by large groups in large institutions with big budgets. But i think you will be surprised when you find out the subject matter of my paper. But all in good time. I still have to complete some of the research. You might think modern science has the vast bulk of how nature works. But in reality, we are only just getting started. We have a very bright future, i hope i can contribute to that in some way.

John.

 

[nbo10]

Do you have access to articles from relevant journals? Without such access it would be difficult to be tuned into state-of-the-art research.

 

[weburbia]

I feel obliged to point out that the vast majority of scientists who use arXiv will not look at viXra.

viXra gets thousands of hits every day including its fair share from academic sites. It is found mostly through links and keyword searches so it does not really matter that people don't go there specifically to look for the latest papers.

Feel free to put it there, but if you want anyone to read it and use it, you're still better off trying to get it published in a journal, and if you can do that you'll have no trouble getting it endorsed for arXiv. And if your work truly is mainstream science, you should have no trouble getting it published.

I agree that seeking to get it published in a journal is a good idea, however you underestimate how difficult that can be for someone with no academic affiliation. Publishing in high impact factor journals seems to be very difficult and possibly expensive for outsiders, even when the work is mainstream. There are low impact factor journals that are easier to get into but they also give less impact. Such a publication does not mean you will easily find an endorser for arXiv, and even if you do the arXiv will probably move it to one of their "general" categories where it is less visible. In any case, half the point of using a preprint archive is to make a copy available before you give it to a journal.

 

[eri]

Most journals will waive publication fees if you don't have an institute willing to pay for it. Academic qualifications don't matter; they will read your paper no matter who you are if you submit it in the correct format and it's not obviously crackpot. Some high impact journals also have high acceptance rates; ApJ is a top astrophysics journal, and accepts nearly 80% of submissions. And if you did get it accepted, there wouldn't be a problem getting it endorsed. If the poster got something accepted to ApJ, I'd be happy to endorse for them.

 

[twofish-quant]

I agree that seeking to get it published in a journal is a good idea, however you underestimate how difficult that can be for someone with no academic affiliation.

This is very field dependent.

Publishing in high impact factor journals seems to be very difficult and possibly expensive for outsiders, even when the work is mainstream. There are low impact factor journals that are easier to get into but they also give less impact.

Even low impact journals give you more impact than no-journal.

In astrophysics, the "bread and butter" articles from the United States all go into Astrophysical Journal or Ap. J. Lett. and they have something like a 75-80% acceptance rate. The attitude of Ap. J. is that they will publish anything that isn't obvious crackpottery.

Things are very, very different in other fields.

 

[eri]

While ApJ does publish close to 80% of submissions, they won't take everything you send them. As a referee for them, I've recommended several papers not be published for various reasons. They simply tend to get fairly high-quality submissions in the first place, and do have a high impact factor in astrophysics.

 

[zahero_2007]

Can you just name the field of physics that your research can be sorted under?is it quantum mechanics , condensed matter physics ...etc?

 

[twofish-quant]

While ApJ does publish close to 80% of submissions, they won't take everything you send them. As a referee for them, I've recommended several papers not be published for various reasons. They simply tend to get fairly high-quality submissions in the first place, and do have a high impact factor in astrophysics.

A lot of astrophysics papers are I ran this computer simulation/looked in my telescope and this is what I saw. Those go into Ap.J. If your paper is "I looked in my telescope and saw space aliens", you wouldn't publish in Ap.J., you'd send your paper to Nature or Science.

The other thing is that the 80% publication rate is the fraction of papers that eventually get published. It's uncommon for a paper to be published immediately without the refreree asking for revisions, and a lot of the three to six months that it takes to get a paper published in Ap.J. involves back-and-forth with the referees.

In some fields, the journals consider themselves "gatekeepers." This tends not to be true in astrophysics where the gatekeepers are the grant review boards. Once the telescope allocation committee, computer allocation committee, or grant review board has approved a grant proposal and you've done the work and gotten results, it's unlikely what what you have is unpublishable.

Also, journals are mostly for score keeping, quality control, and archival purposes. No one I know reads Ap. J. for the latest developments. People read Los Alamos for that, because by the time it gets into Ap.J. it's six months old.

One thing that makes astrophysics "work" is that the major journals are all owned by non-profit professional societies, which is why you can get all of the papers online. In the medical field, the major journals are owned by for-profit publishers and you get into a lot of non-sense that astrophysicists don't have to deal with.

How to get a paper published is very, very field specific. Personally, I think that the publication system in astrophysics works pretty well, but the publication system in economics is extremely broken.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also journals are *terrible* for handling new and original ideas. If you have a new and original idea, then you want to share it with your friends over beer at a conference.

 

[Dale]

you underestimate how difficult that can be for someone with no academic affiliation. Publishing in high impact factor journals seems to be very difficult and possibly expensive for outsiders.

I have no academic affiliation and publish a half-dozen papers per year or so. The only difficulty is that people w/o academic affiliations rarely have anything of high enough quality to pass peer review. Those that do have high quality research and writing have no more difficulty getting published than their academic counterparts.

If an academic wrote a great paper and a non academic wrote a piece of junk and then they swapped papers and each submitted the other's paper then generally the academic's affiliation would not make the junk pass peer review and the non academic's lack of affiliation would not prevent the great paper from passing peer review.