Despite the prevalence of online submission systems for articles, the covering letter provides an additional means to tell the journal and its editors why they should consider your article. This is particularly important because the initial editor screening your paper, who is deciding if it warrants peer review, may not necessarily be an expert in your particular specialism. It is therefore essential that you provide a concise summary of what your research adds, and how it will contribute to the journal, in your covering letter. This is especially relevant to highly technical or niche papers.

As a researcher, you know what questions you want to address and which problems you want to solve: the key hypotheses that you want to test and why these issues are important to you and your colleagues. One of the major barriers to writing successful funding applications is transferring your own passion for a particular research question to a wider audience: why should a funding agency or a set of reviewers find your research important and significant? Once early career researchers develop this essential persuasive skill, they can look forward to a successful academic career; after all, obtaining grant money is often one of the most important steps in getting any research project started.

What is SCI?

The Science Citation Index (now the Science Citation Index Expanded, or SCIE) is one of the core databases included in the products Web of Knowledge and Web of Science, owned by Clarivate. This was formerly owned by Thomson Reuters, who were acquired by Clarivate in 2016.

The idea of promoting yourself can seem awkward.  However, with it becoming ever more competitive to secure positions and funding in academia, we all need to showcase our experience and achievements, and ensure that potential employers can see our best qualities.

A thesis is a big undertaking, usually 60,000 to 80,000 words.  It’s likely to be the longest thing you’ve ever written, and when it’s complete, you’ll be examined on it.  It’s very common to be worried about whether you can write a successful thesis.  If you’re writing in English, and it isn’t your first language, that can be an even bigger worry.

As you know from the previous article, the quality of the manuscript is a decisive criterion for its screening in/out at the pre-peer review stage—that is, the initial editorial review. However, a manuscript may be rejected by the journal editors for a variety of reasons, including subject matter interest, and sometimes even simply pipeline management—namely, too many articles on the same topic. But, most typically, a preliminary editorial review aims at identifying whether the manuscript:

1. sufficiently satisfies editorial guidelines of that journal;
2. is likely to provide clear scientific contribution and implications for the domain in question; and 
3. has some likelihood to be favourably evaluated by the journal’s peer reviewers.

As you already know, the quality of the manuscript is a decisive criterion for its screening in / out at the pre-peer review—preliminary editorial review, that is—stage. During an initial review, the journal editors generally aim at identifying whether the manuscript:

1. sufficiently satisfies editorial guidelines of that journal;
2. is likely to provide clear scientific contribution and implications for the domain in question; and 
3. has some likelihood to be favourably evaluated by the journal’s peer reviewers.

What are the Differences between Single-Blind and Double-Blind Peer Review?

• In single-blind peer review, only the reviewers are anonymous. Reviewers know the authors’ names and backgrounds, but authors don’t know those of the reviewers.
• In double-blind peer review, both the authors and reviewers keep their anonymity. Only the editor knows the identity of all parties involved.

What is Peer Review?

Peer review is the process where an academic author’s work is subjected to the examination of other experts in the same field as part of the journal publication process.

London, September 2020: Portland Press Limited has partnered with Charlesworth Author Services to provide Portland Press’ global biosciences author community with English language editing and publication support services through English and Chinese local-language web portals. Portland Press is the wholly owned publishing subsidiary of the Biochemical Society and publishes both journals and books in cellular and molecular life sciences.  Charlesworth currently provide Portland Press with sales representation in China.

Withdrawing an academic article means asking a journal to stop considering the article for publication at any point prior to its actual publication. This means that the article will no longer proceed through the peer review process, will not be published, and becomes the authors’ “property” once again, to revise and/or resubmit elsewhere if desired.

Retraction is removing an article from the scientific record at any point after its publication. Retraction is distinct from withdrawal, which occurs prior to publication. Also, in contrast to withdrawal, retractions are visible to the scientific community, as the original papers are typically preserved as part of the publication record.

When beginning a research project, one of the first steps you are likely to carry out is performing a literature search to obtain an overview of the current state of the field. Performing a literature search can help you understand what is currently known about a specific topic and what question or questions remain unanswered.

Using punctuation in English-language academic writing is important to help ensure that your intended meaning is conveyed as clearly as possible. In addition, using punctuation correctly gives readers (including journal editors) a good impression of the quality of the paper, which can affect the perception of the quality of a study. In this post, we will talk about some of the common mistakes and misunderstandings around punctuation in English paper writing and how to avoid them.

Before submitting your manuscript to an academic journal, it is important to format it according to the journal’s guidelines, which can cover anything from the font style used to the sections that should be included in the paper. Formatting a manuscript can be a detailed, time-consuming process, but there a several advantages to submitting a properly formatted manuscript.

Reference management tools are software programs that can help organise and cite references for academic writing. They serve as “virtual libraries” in which you can store hundreds of references to published papers that contain all of the relevant publication information, such as author names, journal names, volume, issue, page numbers, and more. 

A presubmission inquiry is a quick and easy way to gauge the likelihood of your paper being sent out for review if you choose to make a formal submission to an academic journal. 

Getting a response from a journal you have submitted your paper to can be a tense moment: the decision to accept, reject, or revise is a major step in the publication process. Much of the feedback received at this step will be about the scientific content of your paper.

Getting your paper published can be a long and arduous process. You may not be able to control what the editors think or what the reviewers say; however, you can make sure that your paper is in great shape in order to help accelerate the publication process as much as possible.

Peer review acts as a quality check on academic literature, defined as ‘a formal system whereby a piece of academic work is scrutinised by people who were not involved in its creation but are considered knowledgeable about the subject.’^[1] The peer review process ensures that all manuscripts submitted to journals meet certain standards, with most journals following similar steps.^[2]