For most PhD students and early career researchers it is only much later on they discover just how long the journey can be between finishing the research study and having an accepted article published as part of print or electronic format. It isn’t so much because their work has no merit; after all, good scientific output is hugely important!
What Journal Reviewers Look For
However, when it comes down to publication success, more often than not it’s the writing up which makes the difference; is the point made clearly? Are processes explained well enough?
Do the results make sense given what was already known beforehand? And perhaps even more importantly, are you able to reveal the people who matter (editors, reviewers) why your addition to the literature will make a positive contribution? For many international scholars who have grown up outside English speaking countries these can feel like especially difficult questions to answer, not least because we know there’s an inherent advantage simply due to the fact that our mother tongue is different to the one used within academia. When it comes to high level scholarly journals there tends to be an assumption that we should all share similar levels of proficiency built upon years of continuous immersion and exposure but unfortunately such conditions aren’t necessarily available to everyone regardless of the importance of publishing top quality work.
In high school journalism internship opportunities across America, internships provide students with practical experience in covering news, reporting stories, creating broadcasts, as well as publishing their own newspapers. The programs also help build critical skills for a successful college application.
Just as fast, though, bad presentation can sink solid research.
The Language Quality Expected by Leading Journals
As volunteers who do peer review for our journals know, their time is not free. Every minute spent with your paper is a minute not available for something else. If your paper is difficult to read, if you bury your main idea in long sentences that twist back on themselves; if you mumble your method so readers don’t understand why you did what you did.
If you tuck your outcomes in obscure places where it’s impossible to get a real sense of them because you’ve tucked it all away in a citation, then you’re putting on an extra burden. It doesn’t matter how good your data are; this added load will tilt the odds against you. How things start counts. Do your abstract feel clear and exact?
Does it leave me curious to know more? Are my opinions formed before I even start reading the introduction? How well does the introduction hold together? Does it build from one point to another?
Other pieces make this very point bluntly: If wording comes between your message and its audience, then there’s no hope for your article. Rather than reach your readers, it’ll be returned unread, not because anything was wrong with what you were trying to communicate but simply because the communication fell short… You might think that this problem represents only one minor hiccup on the path to publication. But you would be mistaken.
I can tell you, from experience, that poor English does slow things down in a very real sense when papers are undergoing peer review. In fact, how well (or poorly) something is written actually has a lot more bearing upon whether it proceeds through the system than any number of ‘wordsmithing tweaks.’ That sounds harsh, I know, but it’s true. To start with, using the wrong tense or person sometimes outcomes in rejection letters arriving faster than usual because it makes the work difficult to read. Why?
Because nobody knows exactly what the author had intended to write. Secondly, misusing technical terms that need specialist vocabulary raises issues over expertise that cannot easily be addressed by an editor. Thirdly, if the structure of sentences twists and turns such that the actual point of interest becomes obscured within them, then once again, there’s just no way to rescue something like that from rejection without either major editing or big revision.
In most cases, there is someone else who does write clearly in English and also knows enough about the subject area to spot problems when authors don’t. They read everything afresh for each sentence (as opposed to carrying round all the writers ‘hidden’ assumptions as they would) so where things slip between the cracks, this person catches them, those places where the words didn’t quite meet the intention; which is the sort of thing you might not pick up, however thoroughly you revise your own writing yourself. The person sees with more than just their eyes, seeing beyond the page. It takes distance to achieve that perspective.
The Framework Behind Easy-to-Follow Manuscripts
We may find ourselves starting our manuscripts half way into a thought. And sometimes it’s the sequence of sentences rather than any person word choices themselves that hold back clear understanding. If we stumble over the flow of thoughts then even though every single sentence makes perfect sense, our reader may become disoriented and lose interest, unable to follow us to the end of the argument. There are many aspects to getting things right.
But it’s not just grammar and vocabulary, but the overall structure which decides if meaning seeps away or sinks in. It seems strange to say it, but despite its lack of visibility, structure plays the leading role here. In many cases, pieces fall apart because they’re great at explaining how this research fits into what has been done before (or not), but then leaves the question of ‘what’s missing?’ hanging, or else moves too quickly into announcing the results and leaves readers wondering where these fit into the big picture of the work so far. Take some time, therefore, to lay out the steps one-by-one.
While it’s good to write with as few words as possible, this is definitely an instance where clarity trumps conciseness. Don’t simply tell your reader what you did, but also try to let them know why it matters. In fact, take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of another researcher who might be interested in this piece, but is coming to it from somewhere else in the field, and ask yourself whether you have said enough that they could understand both what you did and why it matters even if they don’t know anything about your work so far. This is where specificity comes in.
Again, I want to emphasize that the devil is in the details. As someone who has read a lot of scientific papers, my experience is that I can forgive a lot of things if I feel like the authors know their stuff and have provided me with a good account of their methods, data and interpretations.
What Strong Editorial Help Actually Gives
If you’re a researcher in China writing for a major English-language journal such as Nature or Science, what might actually help you most is not so much getting someone to fix comma splices and misspelled words, but rather stronger editing on the level of logic, flow and clarity, not just person words, but ideas as well. Real change comes through real revisions, where ideas get strong along with the prose. The vast majority of papers that ultimately end up in Nature or Science go through multiple rounds of rewriting first, then the author (or authors) gets them to the point where they can be approved by a team of editorial specialists who have read hundreds if not thousands of similar papers before and understand not only how arguments are made, but also the way people typically write those kinds of things in those journals. In each round of changes, the logics and the words sharpen one another, until finally after many rounds of careful tuning, the paper stands a chance of being accepted and shaped into something recognizable by the readers of Nature or Science.
The type of knowledge influences how well you’re understood by readers. Where other copy editors will leave off, these experts go one step farther and make judgments on whether jargon matches reader expectations or not. Without such background, there may be holes in logical arguments that could otherwise be caught and filled. Such professionals’ familiarity with different levels of style used during discussions allows them to ensure the level of writing matches commonly accepted standards within your field. Only people who understand your research subject can pick up any differences between a story line and what reviewers would expect based on their own experience reading papers in your area.
For researchers pursuing careers that will take them to international institutions, like academics considering graduate study at leading New York universities like Columbia, NYU, and Rockefeller, where publication record is a primary criterion for admission and scholarship decisions, the investment in manuscript quality is not just about any individual paper. It is about building the publication record that determines which doors open at each subsequent career stage.
Writing Habits for Long-Term Publishing Success
If we look at most frequent authors of publications in leading international journals (the so called “top” authors), we’ll see that these positions are rarely occupied by researchers working under famous lab leaders, who have already published several books, nor by young promising students whose names appear next to their scientific advisor’s name as coauthors on every paper. Much more often, such places are held by people who made writing into an integral part of their everyday activities. They continue to produce texts even when there’s no feeling of inspiration; they allow feedback to affect their articles and presentations-they seek it and react to it after receiving it; they follow the rules set forth by editors of target journals, learning about them over years rather than days before submitting manuscripts. For many such people, skills associated with good academic writing only increase in strength over time because of consistent daily efforts.
And what should beginning academics do to become really effective writers quickly? It turns out that nothing fancy or complicated! The best way to learn how to get things done right and fast is to share any piece of unfinished work with somebody else who does something similar. That someone could be your teacher who points out where you forgot important facts, colleagues whom you trust, or journal reviewers who illustrate weaknesses in logical connections between arguments or offer alternative ways of expressing particular thoughts.
If you send a paper that really matters, how it’s written can hit you just as hard as what was discovered. It can help or block strong results from finding their rightful readers. That kind of support for scholarship often goes unnoticed, but it’s powerful. Especially if you are shooting for far horizons, moving the ball downfield in your field, one paper that makes its way with strong findings where they can do something major, get used, referred to, open up new paths, can have an outsized effect.
But another just as good paper could be lost and left to sink to the bottom, not because it lacks value but because it tripped over itself as it was being written, so nobody saw how good it really was, no one picked it up and no one got anything out of it. And a third will never take off at all because the reviewer who’s feedback on how to improve the writing only has time to give feedback on that rather than giving feedback on the meaning, so the author doesn’t know how to make the text well, the reader doesn’t know what the point of the whole thing is, and it dies without ever making a ripple.
Thank you to Empowerly.com for contributing this article.
