How to submit a paper? You might be asking yourself this question if you are a beginner-researcher. Don’t worry. It’s not complicated. In this post we will try and show you, how it works.
How to submit a paper? Step one: Make sure you got everything right!
Right before you start uploading your files, give the instructions to authors a final look through to make sure that you haven’t missed out any important information. For example, a lot of journals require that you include your funding and disclosure that say there’s no conflict of interest in this particular journal request that stated in the COVID letter and also in the main manuscript. There are lots of small details to pay attention to, and it’s important because you want to get this right because these are the sort of things that are straightforward to fix in your file before it’s submitted to the journal. You want to check the word count. Take, for example, Springer Nature – 750 words for the introduction, 1500 words for the methods, and the rest is results and discussion. They do like you to have short abstracts, 100-250 words. You need to include an informative title – 150 characters, and as well as running title, which is about 60 characters. So once you’ve checked that everything in your file, in your Word file is consistent with the instructions to authors, then what you can do is you are ready to upload your paper.
Time to actually submit your paper
Let’s say you want to submit your paper on Neuropsychopharmacology website. Search for the website of the paper of your choice, then press ‘Submit’. Usually, when you submit your paper for the first time, you have to create an account. When you submit a paper, first of all you need to upload your files. And the reason why it’s helpful to have all of your files in one place is when you choose your file to upload, you can upload them in a logical manner. Normally, you’re asked to upload your cover letter, then your main paper, and then your figures, and then any supplementary material so that gets uploaded. Usually you also have to add the description for each one of them and set them in the correct order.
Let’s get to the core part of the submission process. Go ahead – save and continue. Most journals ask you to copy and paste your title: both short and running. Make sure to fit in the word limit. It’s exactly the same process with the abstract. Save and continue. Then you upload all of your author information. Each author has to have their own separate sort of details. So you’ve got your name tc. Then in this particular journal, they like you to identify what is the more specific type of focus of the paper.
For example: biological science, cancer, melanoma, neuroscience, diseases of the nervous system, schizophrenia. Then you have to add the technique which you used. For example: field potential recordings. There’s not actually too much choice, but you have to choose the most relevant. After that, the journal asks you for some more information. Read all of the information about the journal. If there is a conflict of interest, you have to explain what that conflict could be. That’s quite important because you want as many people to read it as possible. You also might have to answer if it’s a clinical trial or not. Each journal will have different questions, but the overall format is very similar. They often ask you if you need your paper printed in colour or not. You also have the possibility of suggesting up to 6 reviewers and 6 reviewers that you’d like to exclude for some reason.
The next step here is to validate. Uploaded your file as a PDF of Word file. It comes out as a PDF. It’s important that you get the date right, really pay attention to who the editor is of the journal and get that right and also stress the name of the journal as well. And if you’re sending it to other journals, make sure that you edit it. If it gets rejected, make sure that you edit that very carefully. So you’ve got the correct journal and the correct there. So I’ve got my figures, my main text, supplementary material, I can check that.
Download this document, and then go through that later on, make sure there’s no obvious mistakes. It’s important that the other authors have seen a final version of the manuscript. The journal often requires that. And then once you’re happy with it and the other authors are happy, then that will get submitted. This stage, it’s almost ready to go. There’s just one button that you click, which is the final submission. And then you’ll be asked, are you sure you want to submit? And say yes if you’re sure.
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Good luck with your publications!
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