Planning and managing your Publication Pipeline

The currency of the academia and the research community is publications, and the high-denomination notes are publications in prestigious journals. Publications in journals are what counts; those represent the hard currency: presentations at conferences, articles in newspapers and magazines, tweets, posts on Facebook and Linkedln, and so on may boost your Altmetric score, but a strong resume demands original research papers. Given that, this article gives some tips on managing your “cash flow”, which can be difficult because it can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years after uploading or submitting a manuscript for it to be published—assuming that it is accepted in the first place.

Dealing with the slow publication process

Realise that getting a paper published in a good journal is a marathon, not a sprint: you need staying power and persistence and a thick skin to ensure that you remain unperturbed by rejections. Here are some tips to help you along the journey.

·         Push yourself to have multiple manuscripts in the pipeline: As each manuscript in the pipeline advances towards eventual publication through the usual stages, namely submission, initial scrutiny, peer review, revision, typesetting, proof correction, and publication, fresh manuscripts should enter the flow.

·         Start writing early: It is unnecessary to wait for a piece of research to be complete before you start writing: in fact, it is a good idea to start writing the methods section of your manuscript while the laboratory or field work is in progress, because you will have all the details fresh in your mind. Next, write the results section as they start coming in, so that you will have more time to devote to the more difficult sections of a typical research paper, namely discussion and introduction.

·         Prefer more frequently published journals: Other things being equal, such as a good fit between the manuscript and the journal’s scope and policies; the journals impact factor, prestige, or stature; and the chances of acceptance, prefer those journals that are published every week, fortnight, or month because the frequency demands a robust and streamlined assembly line. Journals with only 2–4 issues to a volume mean longer processing time.

·         Be proactive in checking the status of your manuscript: Remember that a manuscript represents substantial investment of time, money, infrastructure, expertise, etc. on part of authors and their employers, whereas any investment on part of the journal comes only later. It is therefore perfect to enquire about the fate of your manuscript after a reasonable length of time, say 6–8 weeks. So long as you do it politely and not too often, the editorial office is unlikely to grudge you such enquiries.

·         If rejected, submit the manuscript to another journal: To keep the pipeline flowing, it is important not to be discouraged by rejection. It is also possible that although the journal you approached rejected the manuscript, you received valuable advice on revising your manuscript, which means you will be offering the next journal a better product. However, remember that no manuscript can be submitted to multiple journals simultaneously: the process has to be sequential. Such simultaneous submissions have come to light when reviewers received identical manuscripts from two journals—and their authors were then blacklisted.

The pipeline and how to fill it

Look ahead at least 2–3 years while planning your research. If you have kept yourself abreast of current developments and trends in your discipline, you will not only know current topics of interest but also priorities and policies of different journals, and you can put that knowledge to good use in managing the pipeline. More specifically, at any time, aim to have a spread of half a dozen manuscripts at different stages, as listed below, working backwards from proof correction (you are near the finishing line) to uploading a fresh manuscript (you are at the starting line).

·         Correcting the proofs (you probably submitted the manuscript more than a year ago),

·         Revising a manuscript in the light of the comments from reviewers (you probably submitted the manuscript 4–6 months ago),

·         Thinking how best to address the reviewers’ comments (with reference to the manuscript submitted 3 months ago),

·         Putting finishing touches to a new manuscript to ensure that it follows the target journal’s instructions to authors (perhaps a couple of days before uploading).

If you follow the advice given in this article, you will be a productive author with virtually no “downtime”!