Forum ekspertów
Twenty golden rules for manuscript submission

The pressure to publish just goes on rising and young surgeons are increasingly drawn into ‘the game’. Unfortunately a lot of new authors rush in badly prepared and go through a painful and bloody experience. It is possible to do a lot of career/image damage with a sloppy attitude to the publication process. Journal Editors are often key decision makers - so need to be treated with respect. With many years of experience running scientific journals, we have seen many of the mistakes that new authors can make before they learn to ‘play the game’. This brief article gives a short list of 20 rules which hopefully can act as a checklist for new authors and help them submit more effectively and with a better chance of success. This article is aimed at authors wishing to submit to English language journals and herein I recommend using ASCII characters and the English alphabet. This is not from any desire to push down other alphabets or character sets - just from the purely practical perspective of making on-line searches, where searching for or on non-ascii characters is often problematic. Twenty golden rules 1. Say something new and interesting: • be patient, • don’t ”jump the gun”, • state novelty factor clearly - in the abstract. 2. Submit to appropriate journal: • send ‘me-too’ studies to local journals only, • send LTTE to the journal concerned - not elsewhere. 3. Don’t duplicate or ‘salami slice’ with previous work: • Editors really dislike this practice, • See joint statement: Eur J Cardiothorac Surg 1999; 16: 1. 4. Do a full literature search: • so easy today - PubMed, Google, HWP, etc., • no excuses for not doing so. 5. Submit on-line effectively: • get help if technically inept, • 70% of new submissions returned to author once, 40% returned twice = huge waste of time and tries patience of the Editorial team. 6. Disguise previous rejections: • don’t make it obvious that the paper has been rejected elsewhere, e.g. edit the cover letter and adapt the manuscript style to new target journal, • don’t resubmit a previously rejected paper to the same journal - if the Editors thought the paper could possibly be revised, they would have said so. 7. Complete manuscript and artwork before starting submission: • irritation for Editors to process...


View full text...