How to get a paper published in a high impact journal?

and thank you for the introduction and thank you to ease I can't remember I can't pronounce GG or whatever so you you did a very good job in kind of anticipation cuz of my slides so I'm having heard about all your research over the last couple of days I have absolutely no doubt that you will be publishing it in fantastic papers and getting great papers that are cited by many other scientists in the future I've been so impressed hearing about what you've done and and it's just been so interesting so what I'm going to talk about today is actually just a bit of background about around what an impact factor is and what all the metrics are that we're currently evaluated on a scientist and also a little as you pointed out there is a lot of controversy about all of the metric factories that are out there at the moment so just a little bit of a thought about that but nevertheless that's kind of the way things are at the moment so that's sort of how we're going to have to work with it and I'll have I'll just give you a brief overview of some of the most highly cited papers so you can get an idea as to what actually really drive citations and lastly a case study so it's just a paper that a couple of papers actually that we published quite recently that were in a reasonably high impact journal but got a lot of good citations and and good reference outside the academic world which is actually really really important and hopefully at the end we'll have some time for questions okay so I'm sure you're all very familiar with the older dodge in academia which is publish or perish so as a scientist people think that you're only as good as the number of publications that you have and as pointed out you're expected to reference your citations or your work on grant applications and so on and it's absolutely true we do have to publish our science otherwise we will perish basically but there's more to publication than just simply getting it in a journal it's important where you publish your science but it's also in what's also important is the quality of the science that you publish wherever you publish it so yes we do have to publish but we also have to think about the publications that we actually produce so I'm really I actually I don't think I actually knew technically what an impact factor was and so when I sat down to write this talk I had looking it's actually quite intriguing I was also wondering how I would fill half an hour but I just had to cut out about 15 slides because I got quite quite interested at all area so the impact factor was invented by a guy called Eugene Garfield who are shown a second looks strikingly like Einstein he was quite a cool looking guy and he first thought about it in 1955 when he was thinking about how we could get some kind of system for tracking citations of publications and in 1965 something called the science Citation Index was produced and that's when the impact factor really came on board it's basically issued by Thompson Reuters who owned the sei and what it technically is is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the preceding two years so an example is an impact factor for journal for 2008 would basically be the average a number of times all of the items had published was cited in that journal in 2006 and 2007 and with a new journal they get an impact factor only after they've been in circulation for two years so that's basically what it is so it's an average number of citations of all of the items publishing the preceding two years and this is him this is Eugene Garfield he came up with this bright idea I think he's a great looking guy but I just want to point out this is so he's actually been he's actually written quite a few essays about the impact factor and if you any of you have any interest at any time outside your PhD they're quite interesting to read and he definitely doesn't think it's the be-all and end-all and this quaint kind of sums it up he says in 1955 it did not occur to me the impact would one day become so controversial like nuclear war sorry like nuclear energy the impact factor is a mixed blessing in the wrong hands it can be abused and that is kind of what happened a little bit and Thomson Reuters who issued the metric they acknowledge their themselves as well so they say impact factors used are used to provide a gross approximation of the prestige of a journal but there are many artifacts that can influence an impact factor and it's really important to know what these are so first of all review articles are cited more frequently than any other original research articles and so I'm sure many of you will have noticed that review journals often have very high impact factors higher than a lot of the journals that were published published original research it's also true that a journal can artificially inflate its impact factor by publishing an unusually high number of review articles over the following years and that does happen if a journal dropped the impact factor and there's huge variation between disciplines in the impact the number of citations and it receives and so it's kind of meaningless to compare your discipline with something that's very very different so if you are in a bt researcher and you're publishing mainly within the traditional obesity journals such as bt international obesity American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and so on you should really comparing journals within that field not with a physics journal or something else it doesn't make sense at all and the item-by-item impact is important so basically journals the impact factor doesn't distinguish between the sorts of items that are used to create the average school so the impact factor also reflects any letters that have been cited as well as reviews and quite often there can be a controversial letter in response to a piece of research and that can artificially inflate an impact factor as well and lastly journals can increase their impact factor by asking that authors when they submit a paper to cite their papers and from the last few years and I say yes expect this because it really does happen it's happened to me quite a few times and I'm an editor on a journal and I've seen that request being made before as well so anyway that's just something to be aware of okay so what is a journal with a high impact factor well I think you probably would all recognize these journal these are pretty much the highest impact factor journals that we have at the moment so we've got science so basically what this means is that the average article published in science in the last year's recited 34 times that we've got the Journal of the American Medical Association nature The Lancet the New England Journal of Medicine which I'm sure all of us would all always like to get a paper engine and if you're lucky enough to work in cancer you can publish in CA account so Jennifer clinicians which has a whopping impact factor of 100 nearly a hundred sixteen I've never heard of anything like that my my office mate Abby is the cancer scientist and so they're always trying to get through things in there they basically would send anything there pretty much as a joke and then you know once every ten years actually gets through the net but anyway so these are you know consider the highest impact factor journals in the field but you absolutely do not have to be publishing in these journals to have a very good paper that's going to be cited there are plenty of very very good journals in our fields and what I have done and I'm very happy to share this with you this isn't actually the full table because it didn't make sense of it on the slide but I have made a list of every single journal in all the different areas that I could ever publish my research in and it kind of depends what I'm researching but I have a list and I have all of the impact factors next to it and I keep it on my pin board and so every time I produce a paper I will then think about what kind of research is this what kind of Journal should just be going to who do I want to read this and then I will check through this and I'm not going to lie I probably would send it to the journal with the high impact factor that I think I could probably get it into okay so there are other metrics with which G's mentioned as well so in terms of metrics and how we measured there are two broad categories there as a scholar metric so it's how you and I as researchers are evaluated and then there are the earth what we call the article level metrics so how an individual paper is evaluated and in terms of scholar metrics I'm sure everyone here is heard of an H index so nation dex is basically the number of papers that you have had cited the same number of times so if I have an H and X of 10 that means that I have 10 papers that have all been cited at least 10 times and people get very obsessed with H indexes and well I'm having a really bad day I will true like colleagues H and X's and feel suicidal but it's you know it's just one metric and also it does depend on which area you work in and it's you know it's good to keep an eye on it but don't get too obsessed of it the i-10 index is probably better metrics for early career researchers is a bit fairer it's the number of publications that you've had cited at least 10 times and obviously if you published a paper 20 years ago and it's been cited 10 times it's probably not as impressive as if you had a publish a paper published last year and it's been cited 10 times but it's probably considered alongside in H and X nowadays article level metrics the I mean the main one is just the number of times that your paper has been cited in other scientific publications and you can easily find this on Google Scholar you can do the cited by click on it if you put your paper in it'll tell you you can also set up a Google Scholar accounts which I would advise that you do which means you can store all of your fellow scientists and see what they're up to and what their indexes like we're having a bad day but also you can keep a track of what's going on with your research and then actually quite recently it's only 2010 another metric came onboard which was caught with con referred to as alts metrics which is the article level metrics and it's supposed to take account of citations of your research outside of the academic world and it was proposed as an alternative metric to impact and it's not perfect either but it basically will tell you how many news outlets for example have quoted your research how many tweets there were about it you can even break it down to your graphically so it's quite useful and it is I mean a course it's not perfect and it's trying to use again quantitative data to qualify something that's very difficult to actually measure but it's something concrete that you can put on fellowship applications for paper so if you publish your paper as student annual or an early career poster can you're looking to write a fellowship application and it's relevant you can say even if it hasn't had time to be cited by lots of scientific publications you could say when I published his paper it was actually referenced in seven different news outlets and received as many tweets all over the world and that kind of looks quite impressive I think so this is the website for altmetrics and pretending this is working nothing much of all them like on my left hand and so this is kind of oh sorry could you put my slides back again thank you and so the this is kind of what it is and it the colors represent different sorts of outlets that have cited your paper but when you look into when you do a search of your paper and it comes up then quite often universities have now linked this so that will sit next to it you can go in and have a look okay so just a little discussion or saw about these metrics that were measured on this was a report published in the UK by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in July last year and it was a valuation of the role of metrics in evaluating researchers and their science and it was quite damning so they said too often poorly diagnosed evaluation criteria are dominating Minds distorting behaviour and determining careers at their worst metrics can contribute to what Rowan Williams the former Archbishop of Canterbury calls a quote new barbarity and our University's journal level metrics such as the journal impact factor should not be used so bear in mind that this is kind of the way that things are going people have been so reliant on it for so many years and a guy called David Cole Quinn who is professor of pharmacology at University College London Hughes prolific writer on this topic and many other topics around sites and got fantastic blogs if any if you want to go look he his comment on this was it's astonishing that it should be still necessary to deplore the journal impact factor almost twenty years after it was totally discredited yet it's still mesmerized as many scientists I guess that just shows how stupid scientists can be outside their own special fields so unfortunately it still considered a metric that we are measured by but bear in mind that the world is changing and so actually what's important is doing really really good science and doing good research okay so this is quite interesting I got quite certain if I was up till 2:00 a.m. talking through all of the 100 most cited papers so last year was the 50th anniversary of the impact factor which of course is an opportunity for nature to have a special issue on it and everyone's you know getting excited about it and so nature asked Thomson Reuters to the hundred most highly cited papers of all time so we have a look at it and it's quite interesting to look at so this guy Oliver Lowry who I'd never heard of before has the high my tiny cited paper full time it's received over 300,000 citations since was published in 1951 and his comment is although I really know it's not a great paper I see if we get a kick out of the response and this was I think a paper that described how you can ascertain the amount of protein in NSA it's not my area but apparently it's very important technique and this is looking through the top hundred papers so nature obviously loving figures and data break it down and they colored all of the different areas of science and you can sort of look to see which is dominating and by far biological lab techniques are dominating the most highly cited papers so what do you need to be in the top 100 you need more than 12,000 citations of your paper very interestingly it's the only two Nobel Prize winners were in there the discovery of the structure of DNA wasn't a quite a few you know groundbreaking findings didn't make it and what became very clear was they were kind of dominated by method statistics and computer software so if you and this guy pointed out recipes or more if citations are what you want devising a method that makes it possible for people to do the experiments they want to do or do it more easily will get you a lot rather than say discovering the secret of the universe and it's kind of true so you're not necessarily I mean I think it's unlikely that anyone is ever going to make it into the top hundred let's be honest in the number of scientists working in the world don't but if you can publish a paper with a really fundamental method then you're probably going to get a lot of citations but I don't think we should focus on that okay so how do we get a paper published in a decent journal that's called a decent journal and you can go on to the nature jobs blog they have a lot of advice from there and they hold workshops and there are webinars and things like that and this guy here Kyle's ogen he's a senior editor and hig ethics so I kind of think that he's probably quite a decent person to give advice on how to get a paper published in a good journal and no one can deny that if you if you can get one publication in a decent let call at home pack decent journal it really actually can set you off on a good career trajectory because people start to recognize who you are and would then be primed to read your future research and but he points out that in order to do this your research has to be of absolutely exceptional quality and he actually said there are two components to this and he talks about the contents and the style but I'm adding in communication here because I think that is as important as the paper itself and getting it published so I'm just going to go through how you do this basically and it's just my view there's no actual science to getting a science paper published it's not completely an art there is things that you should be doing and but it's still a little bit of a gamble it depends on who reviewed your paper and all that kind of thing but in terms of the content I start with the content novelty is crucial so you're finding cannot have been published before you can kind of get rounded because it's also a bit of a selling point so you can you have to really sell the novelty of your particular finding and why it it's me and reading that journal and the other thing is conceptual advancement so if you want to publish a paper in nature or science they have to think that this is a total paradigm shift you're going to change the way people think about this particular topic and okay you have to formulate an important search question so you have to say why it's going to be clinically important what are the ramifications of your search or you have to define new mechanisms completely new mechanism you cannot just be confirming what's already been found for describing something you've got some you've got to explain why this is so novel and so new and how it's going to move the research forward field forward I've said a sound study design and this is just so fundamental I've said it's got to be as near as perfect as possible so the research question that you ask has to be directly linked to the methods that you've used because if the research designer if you use does not answer the question if you're trying to aren't your question about causality but you're using cross-sectional data get it and data it should be at the heart of absolutely everything you do your study can only be as good as the data that you've collected and I know it's actually quite difficult often to get really really high quality data and we're quite restricted but my advice to you is if you don't if you feel that you don't have particularly high quality data that you can put forward for publication then try and access some so there are two ways of doing this one is to collaborate with groups who you know have really good data and often if you know about affiliates being run you could do some analyses on there which isn't core to that research teams questions and they will give you today to do that and I'm really really interested in anyone who wanted to do something on Gemini I'm always open to collaboration so collaborate with groups to do it's not always easy and there's a netiquette around making contact with groups it's often easier if you can get an introduction from someone or you know somewhere in the group but there are also some really really good freely available datasets that you can access as well so in the UK we have a huge number a very large scale epidemiological data sets you're allowed to just go and do an ounce like for example the national diet nutrition survey which we've accessed ourselves in our group and the two guiding principles that my mentor Jane waddle told me which I just think so hilarious them is you know you can't really get some of this she said when you are doing your study and you're writing it up the two guiding principles you have to think about are one if it true and two so what actually she said who cares and she would always you know you could do your study and think it was so exciting and run in there with your analyses and tell her about it and she'd say and and I'd say oh my god if you say so so you know why is it so exciting and if you can't sell that you're a search team you're not going to be able to convince a journal so you have to really get your story straight and it's really important to do that okay you also mentioned about the title right so this diagram here shows you the relative number of reads of the different parts of a paper and this probably doesn't actually come as a huge surprise to you but the vast majority papers only the title is read a few more the abstract is read and a very tiny proportion of the titles that are read people actually go on to read the paper and so you must have a strong title to your paper it's the most important determinant of how many people will read your paper and it sounds like a simple task but it's really not and it's fine to ponder it and have a few different titles over the course of the paper drafting and I would recommend that you do that and I have some I have some friends who work in the creative industry and they're often quite helpful with coming up with title for my paper and so what is a title we'll basically you're trying to condense the main findings of your paper into one sentence so that's what you're trying to do and you might have three different findings in there but you need to summarize the key finding of your paper you need to capture the reader's attention so you need to highlight the novelty of your study and your title should try and distinguish your paper from other papers similar papers in the field and only ever have one key message in a title and there are some do's and don'ts around a title so one of the tips is to use action verbs which make it lively and a bit exciting and keep it short so less is definitely more absolutely no more than 10 to 12 words that's all very scientific I should have said either no more than 10 or no more than 12 for anyway keep it short don't use pointless generic phrases like on the study of investigation into investigation office it's really boring and it is unnecessary and don't include unnecessary details I mean this is stuff I'm sure you already know anyway don't use abbreviations that aren't of you know generally understood don't have a question you're supposed to be answering the question so it should be a statement not a question and lastly a pursuit right people do do this so I'm saying don't use puns metaphors or plays on words you can get away with that for a review article but it's not a great idea for an original research article but people who do it and there are an unbelievable number of titles that reference Bob Dylan lyrics in them and I got quite into this I was like half this is really cool so but this is this is quite funny so there are five scientists at the Karolinska Institute who turns out have had a running bet since 1997 if you can get the most number of Bob Dylan lyrics into a title before they retire and the person who wins gets a free lunch spot not a great prize but anyway so there is nitric oxide and information the answer is blowin in the wind is all the same group then the others came up and and neither published blood on the tracks a simple twist of fate tangled up and blue molecular cardiology in a post molecular area the biological role of nitrate and nitrate the times they are a-changin a dietary night tray a slow train coming mostly F that all those receptors tangled up into in planet control of self positioning and proliferation but the guy who agreed to be interviewed by The Guardian paper who discovered this actually did finish by saying but there is not restrict scientific papers we could have actually gotten a lot of trouble for that this is farticles we've written about research by others but in introduction their editorials things like that so things that are a little bit less controversial cuz if you come up with the title and people it can undermine the seriousness of your science even it's fine although I have to say this was my favorite paper title of all time you probably think this papers about you narcissists perceptions of their personality and reputation I immediately was ho-ho reddit anyway so think about your title it's a take-home message but you know you can have a bit of fun but it's got to have an element of seriousness about it and ok to the abstract so the abstract is really important as well and as you've mentioned I'm also an editor of a journal and it's awful to say but when you're very very busy that might be the only thing that you read before you decide whether to send out for review or not and if it you know what a really bad abstract kind of puts me off even if I've got time and I go and read the paper I've already been primed to be critical about the paper so it's got to be absolutely solid as it can be it's also important because editors will sometimes write in a tutorial or some slots is for a particular issue of a journal and they'll scan through if it's titles interesting they'll go into the abstract so that's what they'll look at to decide whether or not to write an editorial on your paper and if they do then your work gets increased exposure and that's good all-round and so what I've said about abstract your abstract is basically a marketing tool you're trying to sell your paper for someone who's intrigued by the title and you're trying to summarize the key point so the reader will decide whether or not it's relevant and whether or not they want to read it and I mean they said so abstracts are very prescriptive the journal Inessa kind of associate sociology journal most medical and science journals are very prescriptive and what you have to put in different sections I'm not going to go through all the different bits but the key thing is you need to state the problem you kind of need to overstate the problem and then have a grand statement about how your researchers solve the problem or any part of it and it's really important to then demonstrate the broad implication for your finding so outside your field or on a larger scale so then it comes to writing the paper so what I said is meet discuss and formulate a strategy so writing a paper isn't just about you doing your analysis and then sitting at your desk and then drafting it that's not how good papers are written a good paper involves other people especially when your early career and it involves discussion around the findings around how robust they are the angles that the paper is going to take and then you formulate a strategy and what I mean by that is you have to decide what type of paper you're going to write and who the readers are going to be and so in my fields I generally have to decide if a paper is a science paper so my uncovering mechanisms and like talking about that or is it a medical paper and there's fundamentally different papers and sometimes I don't know and it could be one or the other and in that situation I will go and I'll write two to three extended abstracts one trying to write it as science paper another trying to write it as a medical paper and very quickly one of them generally turns into a dog's dinner and so I realized that's not the way to go and so it's quite a good process to do to get you focused on on the kind of the main direction and angle of the paper then you choose an appropriate journal and choose the journal before you write the paper so if you people do that you must do that because you're going to waste your time it's much better to have a journal in mind to know the people who read those papers and what the editors are going to be looking for sort of save you time later and they also have all different sorts of stipulations around how you have to format it that kind of thing so I would definitely find it do that and you know things to bear in mind are if you're if you're going to write it for medical journal you need to think about doctors reading that paper and what sort of statistics you going to put in there doctors like things like odds ratios or relative risk they'd like to see differences between healthy weight and overweight or obese so having a load of multi-level models or betta values and things like that that aren't really directly related to a doctor and what they want to know is probably going to be off-putting and then tell your research is a compelling story so you ask a big question you answer as fully as you can with your research and what I said here is that good research skills as a whole picture the system so set the scene provide the context and then tell them which bits of that system you're you're focusing on and this is really important keep it simple it's really really difficult for our scientists to do that but imagine a GP for example reading your paper so no more than three key messages try and translate your statistics into very simple terms and Jane would always you to say to me if you can't explain it to your grandmother or your mother in simple terms who's not a scientist but really bright then you're you're not doing a good enough job so you need to be able to break it down and make it very very accessible and this is more important than ever and now that we're moving to open access so it's important that people outside of academia are able to read and access papers and at least try make sense of some of it okay slide it right in right it must be well written I cannot emphasize that enough they cannot even be a single typo in the paper there can't be a full-stop in the wrong place typos all over the place half-finished sentences I would reject that paper that just annoys me it looks really sloppy but this is actually really challenging and it's challenging even for a native English speaker and so if you're struggling with this as a non-native English speaker then I would suggest that you invite native English speakers to be co-authors on the paper you can edit the language or you pay a scientific writer to do it because you can you can get away with an awful lot if you have a beautifully written paper and it just makes the whole thing so much more enjoyable to read and what I often do is if I'm thinking about submitting a particular paper to a journal I'll read through some of the papers in that journal the ones for example if you know if you want to go to the New England Journal of Medicine they obviously publish a lot different sorts of papers but I'll look for some that a kind of similar to mine and how they've written how they presented the paper how they've argued it and try and make it enjoyable and accessible okay so I think you've probably all heard the saying a picture speaks a thousand words and nothing is truer than in science and I just wanted to introduce David McCandless here who's a really cool guy he's a data journalist and a designer based in London and he has produced a couple of it one of which is called informations beautiful and his whole kind of career is now built on trying to present data and really imaginative and beautiful ways and data can be really beautiful especially you know if you know if you ever seen a Manhattan floor from a genome-wide Association study but it gets me every time and so this guy has produced this book I've actually got a couple of his books because I love thinking through them and it gives me loads of ideas about how to present really complex data really simply and just a couple of examples so this is his I mean this is a silly thing really but this is them this is what breakups look like over the course of a year based on facebook status updates and you can see you've got a little bit of a peak around Valentine's Day and the spring break bit low on April Fool's Day and then two weeks before Christmas everyone freaks out dumps a partner surrounded by present maybe but I mean that's just fun and then he produced something like this which you can't see very clearly here what's better in my book but this basically this is just over here these are different sectors in the job market with sort of sub areas within the job market and he's trying to look at the gender pay gap so you've got a different thought he's got you could probably work out that the black thought is women and the greens or is men and this is the salary scale across the top so you can look to see where there's a bigger gap between women and men different sectors and you can see if it's bigger at the top end or the bottom end and compared with in so it's just a very cool way of aggregating loads of data much I'm looking to buy that one this guy Oliver Davis who was at the Institute Psychiatry King's College London then at Warwick and now at Bristol and he's a statistical geneticist and he is absolutely brilliant at presenting data visually and he got a welcome to fellowship specifically to develop visual tools to make very complex data accessible to not just other researchers but to the general public and this is just an example of something that he did so what we know from behavior genetics is that heritability estimates can vary wildly like from one city to another they are influenced by age they influenced by social class and he was interested in finding out the extent to which the heritability of behavioral problems varies across the UK so he used the twins early development study and calculated heritability by postcode basically and then he produced a colored map showing that London is a hot spot for environmental influence on behavioral problems whereas in the north-east of the UK you've got like a genetic hot spot where the environmental effects were lower so this is just an example of one of his ways that he was aggravating is huge and very complex amount of data in such as one picture and explaining your data is also really really important so do you try and translate your findings into concrete and easy to understand examples so if you've done a regression analysis and you've got beta values what do they mean what is what is a one unit increase in that thing mean and maybe you could give a concrete example or you could compare it to another risk factor in terms of effect size but do you try and spell it out and again just ensure that your statistics are kind of relevant for the audience and the sorts of things do that audience tend to like means debate ends like odds ratios that kind of thing okay your cover letter so you've done your paper you've written an amazing place you've had a strategy meeting and it's now written for the New England Journal Medicine and so you need to write your cover letter do not overlook how important the cover letter is it's not a small thing it's not just get editor please find attached my paper please review it thanks very much Clara Ellen no no no no no this is your opportunity to sell your paper to the journal and editors do read the cover letter and an editor can be swayed by the cover letter so it's a really important is your one shot probably and do not address it to the wrong editor or the wrong journal I've seen that it's ridiculous it happens all the time and it particularly happens when you've submitted it somewhere and then you decide to resubmit it somewhere else and then you just attach the same cover letter don't do it change the date these are really simple things just check it and looks so bad okay so what do you do in your cover letter address it to the editor-in-chief address it to him personally so that indicates that you know the journals editorial committee that you bothered to have a look online at least who they are don't don't have it as more than one side sometimes they ask you to include references and then list them in that situation you can list the references on page two but keep the content of the letter on one page and what you have to do with a cover letter is you have to convince that journal why they should publish your paper and this includes telling them why the study fits in with the remit and the scope of that particular journal so you need to know what the remittance to go for that journal is and you can put a few keywords in because they always will publish that and you need to talk about the journals readership so if it's doctors or psychology whatever why they'd find that important and why it's something they would want to read and also the novelty of your work because all journals want you to produce novel work and what I do as I mentioned before is before I submit something somewhere I'll tend to have a look through the journal and I mean I'll give you an example in a minute if the one I submitted is new exaggeration but I spent days flicking through the New England Journal of Medicine looking for papers that were remotely in my area so that I could make a story about why they should publish mine because being a behavioral scientist sometimes people can be a bit sniffy about science and then the most important thing after you've got your paper submitted and published this is as important as publishing your paper you need to then publicize your paper and so I would suggest that you put together a publicity plan so good papers will get just as many citations and lower impact journals as in high-profile ones it's a good paper and you manage the publicity and the press release well you will get attention so the journal reputation iev you know the impact factor whether its nature science whatever it's really just a vehicle to assist in you getting exposure for your science it's not the end of the story and just to say there are a lot of time papers puncturing low impact journals and there are a lot of low impact papers that end up in high-impact journals that publicity is really really really really important okay so just very briefly I'm just going to finish with just showing you what we did for these was actually two papers that we published at the same time in JAMA Pediatrics so what we decided to do was we were writing these papers alongside one another one was in one was showing the satiety sensitivity is mediating kinetic risk of obesity using measured obesity genes identified through genome-wide Association studies and the second paper was related which was showing that infants who are infant twins who are discordant for satiety sensitivity in the first two weeks of life grow with discordant trajectories over the first 50 months of life so we basically came up with a bit of a story to develop and take forward our theory about the importance of satiety and with these two papers so what do we do well first of all we had several meetings and we debated whether they were science or medical papers we wrote our abstracts decided that there probably can be medical in their angle we first drafted it to the New England Journal of Medicine and I spent ages going through New England Journal of Medicine papers seeing how they wrote them what angle they took so that I could then drop name drop them into the cover letter and say look you published these before this is why you should publish mine it's in the same area but it's actually providing completely new angle on it and then we actually put some additional data into the pages to make it appealing to doctors so we put additional medical statistics in there and we then sent it to a guy called Meeker fujimaki and Athol single who are both professors at UCL who had a lot of papers published in places like The Lancet the New England Journal of Medicine nature because I thought that they would be able to give me really good feedback on the paper which they did so following a discussion with them and they were very very kind and agreeing to review it for me I then modified the pace quite a lot I then submitted it to the New England Journal of Medicine who reviewed it I got two positive reviews and one damning one and so they rejected it but I incorporated all of the comment and the paper was changed quite radically actually from the first time I submitted it I then submitted it to jammer they also reviewed it again some positive some negative reviews and they rejected it again I incorporated their comments and they advised me to resubmit to JAMA Pediatrics and so at the time it had just changed its name as well I was thinking oh I don't know about that maybe we should try another higher impact Journal first and but they were formerly called the archives of pediatrics and adolescent medicine and I was submitting this around 2013 they literally just changed their name and I just had a hunch that when they change their name to JAMA Pediatrics that the impact factor would go up and it did so that was kind of one of my the reasons why I thought that would be a good move and then as I said we we submitted two related papers to the same issue just to kind of make a bit more noise really and then wrote a highly targeted coverlet and identity we'll be able to read this here but this is just an example of the cover 50 cents in New England so first of all I made a pre-submission inquiry so I can test the editor and I said listen I've got this tape I would you think and he said as they all do oh it sounds interesting why don't you just admit it so we did we said following your suggestion we're submitting it over blah and then I said the new English L has published some key papers in this area in 2008 buhbuh blah they probably first and then in the September 2012 issue these guys showed this showing that potentially society mechanisms are being overwhelmed what was going on and our study part provides new insights it's the role of satiety directly linking it to this we believe our findings are important in advancing the understanding of beauty college of obesity blah blah blah and then we devised a publicity plan so the first thing you always need to do as soon as you find out from the journal that it's been accepted publication find out the publication date they won't often know and sometimes it depends on those of things like when they receives the money and it will go online before it is in hardback copy but find out the publication date soon as you can because the press office need to know then you contact your University Press office you can also work with the press office of the journal and other organizations and then you need to draft a really solid press release and that is quite a big and tricky task and I would advise any of you to go on a course and there are some that there for early career researchers that will teach you how to do it then you work with your journal press team to raise the profile of it if you have them call your own contact so I've actually over the years I built up a few contacts in the media of my own and I will call them if I have a paper that we published and then once it goes online and the press release goes out usually under embargo for 24 hours the journalists often will want to speak to you if they're interested so be available on your mobile for the day and the night because they will call you all sorts of hours of the day and if you're not there they can't speak to you they might miss report the findings which happens an awful lot I'm all they might not write about it in the end and I've taken calls on you know beaches on the holiday before and that kind of thing and if you really really really want to raise the profile of your findings then you have to make every effort to get it out there so after that we got we managed to get an editorial in JAMA Pediatrics so the editor wrote a piece about the two papers and then Nature Reviews endocrinology wrote an article on these two papers on the whole theory after that and these are just some of the old metrics so we were in the top 5% of all research outputs but the top 1% for quite a few both of them in the end so they we got quite a lot of coverage outside of academia in quite a lot of news outlets and tweets and things like that so just last me and there is guidance out there for this so macmillan science communication who are the nature publishers offer master classes webinars workshops that kind of thing I would advise anyone goes to one of those nature blogs make sure jobs have a blog which offers some quite good advice there are articles about this kind of thing but to be honest I don't think that they're as useful as actually talking to really good mentors who've done this for years and years and are a DAB handed it and colleagues as well and that's probably as much as advice as I can give it and it's not perfect it's just the way that I've done it you will have your own way and but for my pennies were that's my advice so if anyone has any questions happy to try and answer or anyone else in here you might be able to answer question good luck you're gonna need it okay if you have such as tweet about it I know people can feel quite embarrassed about doing that and I'm really bad for that because I kind of cringe at the idea of putting a status of my facebook saying I published as you maneuver and I've never done it for that reason but it's ridiculous because you know we should be doing them we should be proud of our work blood sweat and tears and certainly tweeting about it and you know your university might have a blog we've got a tower in our grip you have something called the health chatter and so people will treat you out about it and put the press release on there so as much noise as you can make about it do it talk to your friends and family when you go out tell them about it that's how you get outside of the the ivory towers I came up with this question regarding the number of authors yes yeah I think an important issue because now I think editors want to have 40 for each also their contribution yeah so as you said that you can send your paper to nancy of language speakers their inclination if they have to input intellectually to the paper as well because there are papers will publish their stipulation for authorship and there are very clear guidelines I mean for example it doesn't involve if you've just collected the data that doesn't qualify Germany for authorship of paper there has to be substantial intellectual contribution to the papers that size of the research design the kind of writing and the angle of it not just the editing but how you're actually how you're drafting the manuscript yeah angular going to take and advising on the interpretations of findings and that kind of thing but in terms of the number of authors I mean you've all seen the nature genetics papers they've got 300 or every what a joke you know half of them probably not even read through the paper before but at UCL they're getting quite strict about and the number of authors and so we were told no more than five it starts to look a little bit like a job lot it took us more than five and it dilutes the contribution of the authors who are not first or last especially for clinical trials so yeah yeah the realm times it can't be helped would take several years yes so and I rather than at all there are folk people in the laboratory and the antia students let me elaborate for the number of yeah I mean very rapidly yeah and the other piece of advice I would give to all of you actually is and when you have your authorship it's only fair that you're the first author if you've analyzed the data and you've written the paper and I know that can be quite difficult to negotiate with the supervisor sometime but that's something that you should try and aim for I know that often PhD students do an awful lot of work write a paper and end up being the second author and so I would always advise you to try and get your first authorship which is write yours if you've done that but also the corresponding author is considered to carry a lot of weight so in the UK as a researcher if you're the first the last which is senior author all the corresponding author you can submit that paper as your own work that you're kind of leading on and a lot of people don't realize early on the importance of the corresponding author so don't just by default put your supervisor in there if it was me I would put myself down and I'd wait for them to change it

Channel: EASO Obesity

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Rating: 4.9238963 out of 5

Keywords: obesity, easo

Id: -dvPqvLyUz8

Length: 49min 52sec (2992 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2017