One of the greatest responsibilities that a scientist has is writing lab reports and research articles explaining the methods and findings of their experiments. First, an author has to determine which scientific journal they would like to publish in because you can only submit to one journal at a time. Publishing is all about networking. Some scientists know specific editors at a journal, or they were grandfathered in after working under their supervisor or peers. After a research article has been sent to the journal of choice or the journal that they believe they have the best chances at being published in, it is sent off to be reviewed by other scientists within the same general field or that also have high-level scientific knowledge to be peer reviewed. The purpose of peer reviewing is to fill in the gaps that the experiment’s methods might be missing, overall comments about the experiment, advice on how the experiment should be run instead or if it is close to a subject that another scientist is currently writing. Some general guidelines that editors are looking for is a meticulous recount of each step of the experiment so that anyone in the world who reads the paper could recreate the experiment themselves and verify the author’s findings. The paper also has to be in a specific order where each section details a separate concept. The formatting has a special name called IMRAD: intro, methods, results, and discussion.
There are different types of peer review methods: single-blind where the reviewer knows the name of the author but the author doesn’t know the name of the reviewer, double-blind where both the author and the reviewer don’t know who they are, open peer where both the reviewer and author know who each other are, and transparent peer where the reviewers know who the author is and can decide whether or not they want to sign their name on the paper that said they reviewed it. Bias is a huge contender of whether your article gets published or not. As mentioned earlier, publishing is all about networking. An esteemed scientist may know several editors at several journals and have a higher chance of getting their journals peer reviewed and published. The author can also recommend other scientist friends to review their paper to the editor where it has a higher chance of better/more positive advice. A con of bias could be if an editor sends a paper off to a scientist within the same field that hates a particular scientist where it can be ripped to shreds. Both pros and cons affect the credibility of the paper because if your friends review it, its naturally going to have positive advice while your enemies are more than happy to see your downfall. Also, if you’ve known an editor for a very long time and have established a relationship with them, a scientist is more likely to be published.
