I am a young and aspiring researcher who has just entered my first year of college. In the future, I want to get my research published. Can someone explain the whole pipeline for getting my work out there?
Ten minutes of Googling gave me a lot of terminologies, and I am quite confused right now. There are multiple publishers and different types of publications like journals, white papers, conference papers, and meta-analyses. Additionally, there are databases like Google Scholar and Scopus that index your work, and organizations that assign research IDs to every researcher.
Can somebody please help me make sense of all these things or at least guide me towards resources that would help me understand the whole pipeline and the associated terminologies?
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First of all, most likely you won’t be doing research alone. Not at the start, anyways. So when you start publishing your research you will have seniors who will guide you through the process, so don’t worry.
Here is how it typically works, in my experience. I’m writing this assuming you are the first author (I explain later what that means):
* Your research will be funded by someone, probably your supervisor or head of your institute/lab (they in turn get the funding from research grants – which is something you don’t have to worry about yet).
* You conduct your research until you are at the point where you feel like it’s ready to be published.
* You pick a journal who might be interested in your research. Some journals are more popular and therefore more influential and prestigious. Some journals are less reputable and will therefore also content with less significant or lower quality papers. So when you pick a journal you not only pick based on the area of interest, but you also try to think how “high” you can aim. Is your work cool enough to “Wow” the top journal in the field? Or should you perhaps aim for a less reputable one. Again, your supervisors will help with that.
* You and your colleagues write the paper. Often there is 1 person who will take over the bulk of the writing, but often other people will contribute sections that relate to their area of expertise.
* You assemble an “author list”. This is a **very** important step. Basically, you list everyone who contributed to the work in order. This is often somewhere between 4-20 people (varies greatly by field).
* The first person is the **first author** and should be the one who did most of the work and “spearheaded” the project. This is an important position, because your first authored papers will greatly affect your reputation. If you want to complete a doctorate, many schools require at least 1 first author paper.
* If you think there is a tie between the first 2, you might mark the first as co-authors that contributed equally, so you have two first authors, but even then the first first position is often seen as better.
* After that you list them in order of how much they contributed.
* The **last person** is the most senior person and typically the one who provided the funding (your institute/lab head). Or it might be your direct supervisor if that’s ok with the institute head. This is also important for them, because having last-author-papers is important for applying to research grants and for becoming a professor (if they aren’t already).
* Choosing the author list carefully is important because it affects everyone’s career, so try to be fair and credit everyone fairly. Also make sure everyone is ok with the order, so you don’t have an embarrassing moment where people contest their position in the list after you already submitted it.
* When the author list is clear and the first draft of the paper is written, you *might* consider submitting it to a pre-print server. These are services where you can upload unfinished unreviewed papers. It’s basically an “early access” version of your paper.
* Before making any submission, make sure ALL the authors had a chance to read it and agree to the submission! A co-author finding their work published when they weren’t aware it was submitted yet is another common source of drama!
(too long for one comment – continued in reply)
It will depend on the field and the journal, and when you’ll get into research you will 100% have someone mentoring you (like a PhD supervisor).
For the most part it’s:
– Writing your paper
– Sending it to a publisher through their dedicated channels (you may or may not have to pay. Depends on the journal).
– Publisher sends your paper to reviewers, peers in the field who might have suggestions or find flaws in your paper. These reviewers are anonimous.
– A back and forth between you making corrections and the reviewers reviewing them until they think your paper is satisfactory.
– The publisher publishes your paper
– You get cited/you get contacted/you get criticized/you get ignored.
And that’s the jist of it.
I can’t eli5 this so much, but I can provide a 60-page PhD level guide to some aspects of the process. [link](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/11041649/WritingTips_0720.pdf?sequence=5)
Publishing good papers in good journals is the ultimate skill of a researcher. It takes typically about ten years of training before you can do this independently.
In undergraduate, get all your basics for your field down pat — straight A’s in core classes, research seminars, and internships are the minimum here. This will mean you have the skills to understand your field and an understanding of what research is.
If you like this and succeed at it, you may progress to a pre doctoral program, a research masters, or a PhD. (In some fields like life sciences, you might already contribute to some papers as a junior author.) After five years of professionally participating in the research process and contributing to projects, you’ll have a good understanding of how research is done. You might even have published something on your own or as lead by now!
Then your career begins in earnest — you have to independently figure out what is an interesting question, how to produce answers for it, and how to communicate these effectively to peers. And that is research! You’ll do great if you focus on the long run and work hard at what is in front of you.
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