Publishing in reputable scientific journals

Universities and institutions of higher learning particularly in developing countries are trying to push fellow academics in publishing in highly cited journals. Hence, there are plenty of workshops and seminars organized by various institutions to encourage, provide tips and training in preparing the lecturers to produce more publications. Well, at least, hopefully.

Writing scientific journal paper has little in common compared to writing an English essay. Scientific paper is meant to be [short and sweet], I would say. A good paper should contains no more than necessary information. It has become a tendency for amateur or first time author to include everything into a paper. If your paper is so compressed that you can no longer remove a single word from it without altering its meaning, you have made it.

Ways to write a good technical paper can be easily learnt especially from the internet. First time author can visit, for example Elsevier's website to learn more about guide for authors. It is not the intention of this write-up to touch on this issues.

However, a good paper (in terms of English and arrangement) does not guarantee acceptance in top journals. The main reason? Your piece of study is not original enough. A 100% graded journal paper is no more than an essay if your study is not contributing to the body of knowledge. Editors find no fault in your paper but it remains non-publishable due to the technical content.

So before you dig deeper into your topic, make sure adequate literature studies have been performed. You need to ensure that the topic and issues that you are addressing are significant. Then, the methodology that you adopt must be state-of-the-art. Only then, your findings will be meaningful to the reviewers. Hence, the main reason why rejection rate of new papers are increasing is due to the content of the paper and this is only addressed if young researcher (especially research students) are given proper supervision by academics who understand the real meaning of scientific research.