How to get published?

[TriagePreMed]

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[hopefuldoc97239]

I want to get published, but my professor doesn't know how since it's outside her field of study and she mainly did it out of personal interest.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say your professor "doesn't know how."

The way you get a study published is you write up the study and then you submit it to a journal. The process is the same for pretty much every field, so your professor should know the process even if it's a new line of research.

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If you don't know whether the study is ready to publish or not in its present form, I think the best path for you to take is to present it at a conference and get feedback. If the project is related to balance you might try for a neurology conference, but I don't know anything about them. If it's more basic-science (not too clinical) then the Society for Neuroscience meeting would be good (www.sfn.org).

The difficult thing about presenting at a conference is that they typically require you to have have at least one society/association member listed on the author list for the poster before you can submit your abstract, so either you or your mentor would have to be a mentor.

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I'm thinking this could be published in something related to PMR. Any ideas?

If you're trying to decide which journal to target your manuscript for, the best way is to write up the manuscript including citations, and then see which journals you're citing. These are the journals that are most likely to be interested in your research!

Good luck!

 

[Lazarus]

Dear TriagePreMed,

I would suggest looking into your university to see if there is any sort of research conferences put on but the school itself. I think this would be a great starting point, and it can accomplish your goal within a short time period. Publishing via other means can take years.

More than likely you will end up doing a poster presentation which will be a good way to get some experience and network.

Keep us updated on situation.

P.S. You may also want to look into some on-line journals.

 

[random11]

If you're trying to decide which journal to target your manuscript for, the best way is to write up the manuscript including citations, and then see which journals you're citing. These are the journals that are most likely to be interested in your research!

This is great advice. It is good experience for you just to write up the paper, including citations. You'll know so much more about the field by the time you are done, as well as where it could conceivably be published. When you have written it up, have your advisor look it over (whether it's her field or not, she should be able to critique the paper). If you and she feel it is publishable at that point, most journals have online submission forms for manuscripts. Their editors will review it and give you feedback if nothing else. I'd say it's totally worth it to try. After working hard on a project, it is a great feeling to have the results of your labor published.

Giving a poster presentation at a research conference is also a good starting point. Good luck!!

 

[TreeOfSouls]

Personally, I believe the issues as to why my professor doesn't "know" how is because we're conducting this research at a community college level. She said to me she "didn't know how" because she's "a marine biologist by training." It may just be that's an excuse.

Community college faculty are not always PhD professionals, though they often are. Therefore, it's possible that your professor genuinely doesn't know how to get published. It sounds like she has more background in the actual scientific field (practice) than academia, which is great for teaching but not as helpful for research/publication.

Personally, I don't feel that the research is scientific enough for hard science fields like Neurology. I feel that a hard science would say we have left too many variables unaccounted for (e.g. we recruit from the Physical Education dept and don't account for what classes or other exercises the subjects do). However, when I was in undergraduate doing psychology, I saw all kinds of flimsy things like this being published, so I'm thinking something might take this.

All I can say to this part is... WOW. If you, as a community college student know that your research is not scientific enough for hard science fields, then I'm not sure what the motivation is to publish. I'm aware of the tendency for pre-meds to do things just to "check off" items on the list of perceived "must haves" for applying to medical school. But, it's not easy to get published in a reputable journal and getting published in a less-than-reputable journal is probably not going to accomplish what you hope. It's kind of like saying you were published on someone's blog. Not really very impressive and certainly raises suspicions of doing things for the (desperate) sake of appearance rather than actually being a researcher and going through the typical process. Usually, the motivation for publication is to advance the knowledge base in a certain field. Does your research significantly contribute to the understanding of some aspect of a specific field? If not, I'm not sure why it should be published.

Regarding the "flimsy things" you saw being published as an undergraduate, I want to express my observation that psychology research is actually very difficult to do well and equally difficult to get published. In my experience, it involves some of the most complex statistical analyses and careful, almost obsessive, research design. I have not seen much that is "flimsy" being published in a reputable psychology journal these days. Are you sure that what you saw was flimsy or could it have been your perception as an undergraduate- perhaps not quite realizing some of the complexity of the topic, design, analysis, challenge of scientifically studying the phenomenon, etc? I ask only because it was a pretty sweeping, dismissive comment to make about published research in any field!

From what you described, and as a professor and published author, I would strongly suggest trying to give a small poster session on your campus. If it has further merit, you may find a place for it at the university level at some point down the road. As described thus far, it's unlikely to be accepted at a major conference, particularly without a strong faculty member backing the work. It would also probably be a long shot to publish in a reputable journal, though probably not too hard to publish elsewhere if all you want is to be able to say "I published something" and don't care how it might be perceived by adcoms/others when you are asked for further details.

 

[ChemMed]

Ultimately if you want it published and its a decent piece of work that offers something new and repeatable you can get it published, however your paper may not be in the highest accredited journal of the field. There are several different rated journals for each field often associated with an impact factor. The lower the impact factor the more likely it is that you will be published. The higher the impact factor the harder it will be to publish. You need to research what journals you think the piece can be published in, again this is dependent on the quality of work.

 

[hopefuldoc97239]

Ultimately if you want it published and its a decent piece of work that offers something new and repeatable you can get it published, however your paper may not be in the highest accredited journal of the field. There are several different rated journals for each field often associated with an impact factor. The lower the impact factor the more likely it is that you will be published. The higher the impact factor the harder it will be to publish. You need to research what journals you think the piece can be published in, again this is dependent on the quality of work.

Impact factor is only one thing to consider. But some journals with lower impact factors still have very low acceptance rates. This is especially common among niche journals, where the editorial staff work hard to maintain an focus that is intentionally narrow, but you also see it in some more general journals where the editor takes pride in being highly selective.

Consider impact factor, and also consider acceptance rate.

But, like I said in my post above, the best place to start is to write the manuscript and see what journals you're citing most frequently; those are journals interested in your line of research.

Choosing your target journal based on their publication history is usually more important than the numbers game for two reasons: the editor, and the reviewers. These are deciding factors for publishing your article. Knowing what kinds of papers get accepted in each journal tells you what the editor and reviewers are likely to review favorably.

The impact factor is calculated retrospectively for the whole journal. While editors don't want to harm their numbers by accepting bad articles, it's impossible to tell in advance exactly how often an article is going to be cited. Therefore, they just can't spend too much time worrying about that on a article-by-article basis.

As a personal story, a couple years ago I wrote a paper related to neuroendocrine pharmacology. I submitted it to a neuropharmacology journal and the reviewers hated it. They rejected it and said some pretty negative things about it. I made a few minor changes to the manuscript and submitted it to a neuroendocrinology journal, and the reviewers were enthusiastic about it and the paper was accepted. I really think it came down to the audience!