• Question: What process do you have to go through to publish and share your work? And does peer reviews impact what is shared in the end?

    Asked by anon-253607 on 18 May 2020.
    • Photo: Amber Madden-Nadeau

      Amber Madden-Nadeau answered on 18 May 2020:

      To publish my work, I have to write it up in journal format. I then send this off to coauthors to input and make changes and suggestions; there is often a couple of rounds of this. Then I submit to a journal. An editor will decide whether the piece is suitable for the journal; if not, it will be rejected, likely within a week or so. If they decide to proceed, the paper will proceed to peer review. Sometimes you have the opportunity to suggest reviewers on submission. Ultimately the editor will make the decision, and you will have usually up to 3 reviewers. They will go through your work and make edits and suggestions, and be critical of the science generally. After months, you will receive these reviews, and the editors decision. The editor can chose to reject the paper based on the reviews, accept it with minor edits, or ask for major edits. If they chose the latter, you may find that the paper gets sent out for a second round of reviews, which again might take months.

    • Photo: Michelle Valkanas

      Michelle Valkanas answered on 19 May 2020:

      I think Amber nicely covered the process of publishing! As for the question of how peer review impacts the publication: I believe that the peer review process is very important. It assures integrity and accuracy. The reviewers really serve to make sure the article is not only accurate, but also easily understood and free of errors. Ultimately the reviewers comments are suggestions, you have control over what you chose to do with your research/article, just as the editor has the choice to accept or reject your article. It is important to remember a paper rejection from a journal does not mean it is bad science/writing, but that it just may not be a good fit. 🙂

    • Photo: Gareth Mason

      Gareth Mason answered on 19 May 2020:

      It looks like Amber and Michelle have answered your questions very well – my role is as an ecologist (working with species and habitats in the outdoors) so writing papers for publication is not something I get to do.

    • Photo: Kirsty Pringle

      Kirsty Pringle answered on 20 May 2020:

      The steps I do are:

      1) read other peoples’ work to understand what is unknown
      2) do the experiment to find out the more about the unknown thing
      3) decide if it is interesting / important enough to publish – often I will ask for peoples’ opinions here.
      4) write the paper
      5) send it to a journal that i think might be interested.

      The journal editor sends it out for “review” this is a process where two anonymous researchers read the paper and decide if the science is correct and interesting enough to publish. This is a really important step as they point of review is to stop any incorrect conclusions being published. It’s important because each step of scientific understanding builds on the previous step, so an error can send people down the wrong path. Though it is uncomfortable having people read your work and look for mistakes!

      If the reviews are good, I make any changes they suggest and the paper is published. It’s cool because once it’s published it kind of becomes part of scientific history!

    • Photo: Steve Wroe

      Steve Wroe answered on 1 Jun 2020:

      I look at things slightly differently as I’m involved in the peer review process, from a critical perspective and also write book reviews. Peer review is vital as it allows your findings/conclusions to be challenged by your equals (peers). Without this academic rigour then misleading papers would be published as fact.

Comments

  • Photo: John

    John commented on :

    1. Have a good idea to observe an object to find something out about it.
    2. Persuade other astronomers to let you have time on a telescope. (this is called an allocation panel and they usually only accept one idea in every 3 or 4))
    3 Go observing and get the data. (my favourite bit)
    4. Work out what the data means and discuss ideas with other astronomers. (can take months)
    5. Write a paper saying what you did and what you found out. (can take more months)
    6 Send it to a journal and answer the questions which the referee and editors ask. (takes a few weeks)
    7 Proof read the paper before it is published to find any mistakes.
    8 Have a coffee
    9 Return to step 1 and start again

  • Photo: watkinss

    watkinss commented on :

    Currently with the COVID-19 pandemic, quite a few scientific papers linked to the virus are being pre-released without peer review. I’m wondering how scientists feel about that.

    • Photo: Kirsty

      Kirsty commented on :

      I am certainly a bit uncomfortable about it, I understand that the review process can be slow and that we need a fast response here, but the review process is really useful for improving the quality of the work, it can help pick up on any mistakes and force the authors to qualify their conclusions.

      I would rather at least some kind of express review system, but it’s tricky to find reviewers as we don’t get any recognition for it (its anonymous) and it is time consuming to do, so apart from it being “for the good of science” there isn’t much incentive to act as a reviewer, which slows the process down.