It can be difficult deciding when to submit your research to a journal. For your first paper in particular, the whole publishing process can be daunting.
Is what you have so far good enough? What if someone else publishes first? Could more data make for a higher impact paper? These are all good questions, but you do have to decide to submit your work at some point. Otherwise it will never get published!
Hopefully this post will help you decide if you’re ready to take the leap.
Note: This post forms part of my series about publishing your first paper. I suggest first reading the instalment about deciding what to publish since it ties in closely with this topic of when to publish.
The fear of rejection
I’m sure many of us have an ingrained fear of rejection and failure. The thought of getting your paper declined may therefore tempt you to delay submission, in order to make the paper as robust as possible and increase your chances of getting the article accepted.
This sounds sensible. Avoiding a rejection saves you the effort of resubmitting the paper elsewhere. But inevitably you can’t put off submitting forever!
Leading your first paper submission can seem like a mammoth task. Not helped by how mysterious the process can feel. Although I’d co-authored a few papers myself before leading a first-author submission during my PhD, I hadn’t really had much of an insight into the publishing process.
Having now been through the process, I know that I could have saved weeks or even months of time and energy on my first paper before submission. Time I could have spent on other things!
I’d encourage you to try and get involved with the publishing process early on. I know of academics who encourage their first year PhD students to write review articles, which sounds like a great idea. The earlier you start and get comfortable with publishing, the better.
Deciding when to publish
During your PhD you should always have publishing in mind. A few reasons why are explained here. In fact, I strongly suggest you start thinking about publishing earlier than you might feel ready. In the UK, where theses are the most common form of PhD assessment, it is not always a requirement to have publications by the time you finish your PhD. Even so, they can help enormously. I was so thankful to have at least one first-author paper for my viva!
If you’ve already discussed with your supervisor that you have a finding worth publishing, you’ll need to decide when you want to publish the research.
The quick answer for when to publish your research is once you have enough data to convince reviewers of your conclusions. However, it can be hard to know when that point has been reached.
Once you believe you have something publishable, you can decide between:
- Publishing soon with what you have already, potentially with toned-down conclusions and a more narrow scope.
– With this option you effectively submit what you already have, choosing to not conduct more experiments or analysis.
– Any further experiments are minor and only answer questions which reviewers are sure to quickly pick up on.
– You may not be able to have such far-reaching conclusions, for example if you’ve shown something works only under a limited set of conditions. This could limit the impact of your findings, but saves you time which could be spent on another publication.
Or:
- Delaying publication to either expand the scope or make the paper more robust with more analysis/experiments.
– If you are not satisfied with your paper having a narrow scope, you may elect to conduct further work. This isn’t always a bad idea, if it serves a purpose.
– It could mean increasing the impact of your work: with more researchers finding your work useful (therefore citing it more frequently) and you could aim for more prestigious journals.
It’s really important to know that even if you carry out loads more experiments, acceptance by a journal is never guaranteed. For either route you may be asked by reviewers to carry out further experiments. Therefore be cautious in delaying publication unless it clearly improves the paper.
My experience: For my first paper we had demonstrated our technique with some bovine (cow) tissue. An obvious improvement, for my field, would have been to expand the work to include human tissue.
We could have delayed submission to add this data, but it wouldn’t have been feasible to repeat all of the experiments with human samples. And what would we have done if these results didn’t share the message with our cow tissue?
Instead we decided to go ahead and submit it just with the bovine work, clearly highlighting in the discussion section that this was a limitation and we recommended further work with human samples.
There was some initial resistance from reviewers, but we got it accepted by justifying our position and making the limitation even clearer in the text.
I’ve mentioned it a few times already, but definitely do read the closely-related post discussing what to publish:
Publication quantity vs quality
For better or worse publications are the life blood of academia. They’re the yardstick that productivity and the quality of researchers’ work are judged against. There is always a discussion around how to divide up research into publications, because experiments don’t often divide neatly into separate bodies of work.
If you’re not looking to stay on in academia, I’d suggest not worrying too much about how your research is divided up into publications, as long as you do try and publish it. Even if you’re going into industry please do publish so that other researchers can use your findings. This is especially true if your PhD was publicly funded!
If you’re considering staying on in academia, then you should consider the quantity vs quality of your publications. You can try to add more and more research to a paper in an attempt to increase the quality of your publication*. But chucking more and more experiments at a paper doesn’t always make it stronger. You must always be thinking of your key message. Sometimes it can make sense to split a body of work into two publications if they then both create stronger messages.
*What researchers often usually actually mean by this is aim for a more prestigious journal!
I personally believe that to keep the message of each paper focussed, you should only combine studies if they can together create a bigger story with wider scope. This way you can also get started submitting a body of work once it is finished rather than indefinitely delaying it for more and more future studies to be completed. Otherwise, before you know it you’ll be finishing up your PhD having not made a start on a paper!
Publishing priorities
Deciding how to divide your work between publications is a discussion for you to have with your supervisor and co-authors. However, be aware that although your supervisor should be looking out for you, they do have their own career development to think about, which may not always align with how you want to publish:
- Junior researchers including PhDs & postdocs in a very general sense will prefer a high quantity of [first author] publications to demonstrate productivity. Simply put: more publications on a CV helps future job applications. The quality of publications does still matter and feeds into metrics such as the h-index, but less so than for your boss.
Of course every PhD student would love to be first author for a huge study published in Nature, but this is rarely feasible. If you have an urge to try and publish in top journals, maybe give this option a go!
- Senior researchers who already have loads of papers, would often prefer fewer but higher impact (and more prestigious) publications. Having papers that are highly cited leads to international recognition and will do more for increasing one’s h-index than an extra paper.
An additional pressure for senior staff is that research departments are assessed between universities by their research output (REF in the UK) which is important for league tables. More citations and more publications in top journals boosts each academic’s contribution.
At the very bottom of this article I have a separate section discussing considerations for combining separate studies into even bigger papers. It isn’t relevant for most people but give it a read if you’re discussing combining work with colleagues.
Do you need to rush to publish quickly?
You may be worried about competing against other groups around the world. What if they publish first?
It may seem like a game of cards: the longer you wait to publish the larger the reward (with a more impactful study), but the larger the risks of someone else publishing first and perhaps stealing your thunder.
Unless you’re working on something very specific, where it really is a winner-takes-all scenario, I’d argue that publishing in academia doesn’t usually work like this.
- If you know of other groups working towards the same goal it should be reassuring that you’re on to something worth pursuing!
- When submitting your paper, it’s good in your cover letter to mention recent advances and how your work fits in. Very recent publications by other groups demonstrates it is a hot topic with appeal for active researchers from groups around the world.
- Perhaps there could even be scope to collaborate in the future? It could be a nice secondment for you to visit another lab.
Are you keen to be the first to publish a discovery? Perhaps it would make sense to rapidly submit a smaller article. As discussed earlier, this may mean toning down the conclusions.
Many journals will accept publications in categories such as short communications, or letters to the editor, which may suit your work if you want to publish quickly.
For most of us, even in the sciences, this type of discovery work is abnormal. So publishing really quickly doesn’t matter quite so much. Usually we’ll be developing methods based on previous findings.
It therefore isn’t generally much of a problem if something similar gets published because it doesn’t take away from the novelty of your contribution.
There is so little likelihood that they’ll have done exactly the same thing that it is not worth worrying about. Just because they’re publishing using their technique, does not at all invalidate your findings.
Why you may wish to delay publication
Spending time on additional analysis or data collection may be worth considering if it would:
- Make for a more robust argument. See here
- Increase the scope, and therefore the impact, of the study
There are always going to be extra experiments that you can think of to add.
A bigger paper isn’t necessarily a better paper.
It’s important to weigh up the positives of adding more data against the downsides:
- It takes more of your time, energy and money. All of which you could be using on other things.
- The main message may get lost. The extra experiments may not compliment the existing ones.
- It delays publication. You might not be in a race against other researchers, but getting your research out quickly means that other researchers can implement it sooner.
When should you start writing your paper?
You can of course start writing your introduction and methods while you are conducting your experiments (or even before!) but it’s not always easy to know which direction your research is going in. I suggest to just sticking to notes until you roughly understand your key message.
If you are already happy with the story your research tells, have a look at previous papers with a similar scope to yours. This not only provides a framework for what to include but also gives an idea of when you’re ready to submit.
Looking at previously accepted papers. These will show you what standard your research has to be up to, in order to get published. Look at sample size and validation techniques which are commonly included. Is your work of a similar level to published research in your field? If so, I’d recommend you start preparing a manuscript!
Fitting writing a paper into your PhD
I appreciate that it can be difficult finding time to write a paper amongst the more immediate demands of a PhD. Usually you’re under pressure to conduct more experiments, analyse data, prepare presentations etc. All of which can push writing a paper to the bottom of your agenda.
I strongly suggest finding the time to start writing your paper soon. A few obvious reasons are as follows:
- You remember the work better now than you will in the future, making it easier to write.
- You can put text from papers in your thesis. I saved a huge amount of time doing this. Self-plagiarism rules vary by university so watch out. Even if you have to re-write sections, it’s still much easier than starting from scratch. Also, you have the data analysed and figures produced which can take ages. Start now. Really.
- It helps your viva. When I had the email come through saying my paper was accepted it was such a big relief. I suddenly knew that the viva was effectively a formality.
I hope I’ve convinced you to start writing as soon as you have a story to tell.
In an upcoming article in our publishing series we’ll be going over how to get started on your first draft.
My publishing preference
- Once you have a message you think may be publishable, start writing.
- Each paper should have a clear message. You can considering splitting work into two papers or combining studies together, but isn’t always the best route.
- As much as possible don’t be tempted to delay publication unless you know you will shortly have more data/analysis which could be added and make for a stronger paper.
- Don’t spend ages perfecting your draft paper, have other researchers look it over as soon as possible.
Bonus topic: Authorship considerations for large drawn-out studies
This consideration doesn’t often apply but I’ll discuss it here anyway:
I have seen it happen where several researchers are working independently on different parts of the same overall project. The lead academic(s) decides that it would give a nice story to combine all of this work in to one mega paper. Targeted at a high impact journal. The question is: who becomes the first author?
By combining studies to form a bigger paper, it is possible you won’t be the first author because your contribution has been diluted. This becomes even more likely if the work continues after you leave. Or the other researcher’s work is more fundamental to the project than yours. This all has the potential to turn very political!
Yes, I know that you can have joint first authors and yes it may be good for your CV to have published somewhere prestigious. But there is no beating around the bush: the order of authors matters. This has always seemed pretty fickle to me, but it is a real consideration in academia.
Having publications as second or third author is still good, but usually infers that you didn’t have that much input. Often the input from other authors is easily 10% or less of the effort put in by the first author. Instead of showing hard work to lead a project, being second author usually shows that you help others and collaborate. This is an important skill to demonstrate but this should be in addition to the project you’re working on, not instead of it.
If I were an academic who was looking for post-docs, I’d be concerned if an applicant had lots of papers but almost none were as first author. Perhaps that’s a quirk of the importance put on the order of authors?
This is all a relatively unlikely situation and the vast majority of the time stories are published separately and whomever started the research will see it through to publication.
I hope that this has helped with your paper! You can find the whole series of posts about publishing here. Next we’ll cover deciding where to submit your research. Get alerted about future posts by subscribing here:
