Monthly Archives: February 2012

Do you really have to reformat for each new submission?

23rd Feb 2012

There was a fascinating conversation at the blog of neuroscientist Dorothy Bishop recently. As a side point in a post on getting replication studies published, she says: ...if a journal commonly rejects papers without review, then it shouldn’t be fussy about the format in which a paper is submitted. It’s just silly for busy people to spend time getting the references correctly punctuated, or converting their figures to a specific format, if there’s a strong probability that their paper will... Read more

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The really dangerous formatting errors

15th Feb 2012

No journal editor expects submitted papers to be perfectly formatted. But there are different types of error that cause different problems. Common formatting errors that are easy to spot and easy to fix, like double spaces at the end of sentences Things that aren't really errors, which will be ignored when the paper is typeset, such as spacing between paragraphs 'Errors' that are really matters of house style, such as italicisation of the 'p' in 'p-value' Things that are hard to spot and that... Read more

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Choosing a journal V: impact factor

8th Feb 2012

This the fifth post in my series on choosing a journal, following posts on getting your paper published quickly, getting it noticed, practicalities, and peer review procedure. It is all very well getting your paper seen by lots of people, but will that lead to an increase in your reputation? Will it lead to that all-important grant, promotion or university rating? The impact factor of a journal is a measure of the average number of citations of papers published over the previous two years in the... Read more

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