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)
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