For the past year or so I’ve been ruminating about a problem common to academics: Once you have completed a MS, where do you send it? And how do you follow that process through to completion (i.e., publication)? The literature explosion, as well as the increase in venues and ways to publish, has made this topic an acute one.

What follows is my provisional conclusions from these ruminations: Best Practices V1.0. These practices arise, hopefully somewhat logically, from some axioms. Both have been particularly shaped by discussions with Nate Sanders, by a terrific essay by Brian McGill and by multiple tweets, blogposts, and discussions with Ethan White.

That said, I strongly suspect they will disagree with some of what follows. But then, the more I work on this problem, the more I see that its solution lies somewhere within the remarkable g’mish of practicality, laziness, efficacy, ambition, fear of mortality, and ethics that characterizes doing science nowadays. I, like you gentle reader, am just trying to figure out what works. And caveat emptor: all that follows arises from the consideration that I am a mid-career professor. I suspect much of this will ring true to most. But I hope to see how other folks–grad students, post docs, junior professors, folks at undergrad institutions–formulate their own best practices.

My Motivator

“Ecologist’s die with 99% of what they have learned between their ears.” Dan Janzen.

I was a sophomore at a faculty reception for Janzen at the University of Nebraska when he made this offhand remark. It has never been that far from my thoughts since. It came to a head in the past couple of years,  when I found myself spending too much time revising papers rather than working up data. As a consequence I was falling increasingly behind. This is bad news for any number of reasons: 1) somebody paid for those studies;  2) when they paid for it they implicitly contracted me to analyze it (not just dump it into the grey literature); and, 3) I really want/need to know the answers–out of sheer curiosity and my desire to move our science a wee bit forward. Which led me to spend some time, in quiet moments, over emails, and over beers, coming up with

My Axioms

1. The biggest improvement in a MS happens from Draft 1 to Draft 2.

That improvement is maximized when Draft 1 marinates for a month or more. The process of cranking out Draft 1 wears a lot of ruts in the way I think about my question, the presentation, the results, and their interpretation. A one month hiatus allows my subconscious to work on the problem; at the odd hour, I find myself scribbling notes on various and sundry ways to fix things in the MS. That hiatus (sometimes, but not always a deliberate one in the past) has always allowed me to return with a fresh view and significant improvements.

2. Outside reviewers improve manuscripts in a qualitatively different way than the hiatus between Draft 1 and 2.

Peer reviews are gold. Peer reviewers have the useful feature of existing outside my head. They recognize flaws to which I am blind, point out weak logic that I try to force through by dint of will, and highlight when I communicate poorly (default mode: if a peer reviewer misunderstood something, I didn’t communicate it well). The availability of good peer reviews–like sufficient time, good collaborators, field station happy hours, and grant money—improves the quality of our work. Access to peer reviews should be celebrated but conserved.

Yes, of course some of them are jerks.

3. The rate of manuscript improvement is a positive decelerating function of the number of reviews.

As you work to incorporate the advice of reviewers, a fairly predictable thing happens. Subsequent rounds of reviews become less useful (even if the average length of those reviews is remarkably conserved). In short, there is a rapid saturation in quality of your manuscript with repeated exposure to peer review. In the worst-case scenario, tangible improvement gives way to the stochastic chasing of reviewer whim.

Corollary:

Time spent revising a manuscript means time taken away from other creative endeavors.

4. Papers are not read if people don’t know about them.

Corollary:

If a potential reader does see your intriguing title and abstract on a journal website, they should not have roadblocks placed between them and the rest of the paper.

5. Scientific societies are natural places for scientists to aggregate, discuss, train, synthesize, and publicize the work they celebrate.

The flagship journal of your scientific society is a go-to place for those interested in your kind of work.

Corollary:

Money invested in your society, including publication fees, is likely to go to the people and activities you believe in.

OK, we have our axioms. What do we conclude?  Here is my provisional rules of the publishing road for the next few years.

Kaspari’s Best Practices for Submitting Papers V1.0

1. After completing a MS, let it sit for at least one month.

Then open it with fresh eyes and revise as needed. Then send it for friendly review. Then, and only then, send it out to a journal, and exploit the peer review system.

2. Send the manuscript to a society journal that best matches its audience

Here is my current list:

PNAS for the very best stuff of widest interest (Bert Hoelldobler told me “PNAS is where you go when you’ve got a great story and want the space to tell it properly.”.

Next is Ecology and American Naturalist.

Next is Ecography, Functional Ecology, Biotropica, Ecological Entomology, and Soil Biology and Biochemistry.

3. If a paper is rejected, do not “shop it around”.

Get it out. Ecosphere and Ecology and Evolution are two open access online journals from societies I believe in.

4. Maximize access

Not all society journals are open access. We are not where we want to be, but the times they are a changing. Be an agent of change. That said…

5. Publicize your work

Get the word out. Email PDFs to colleagues who should be interested. Given the publication glut–and my general sense of the universe’s spiraling, magnifying disarray–I am delighted when someone thinks of me enough to send a PDF they think I should know about. And it happens remarkably rarely.

Moreover, if you’ve spent all that time discovering something new and interesting, then

Tweet it

Blog about it

Post links to the paper on your website (when you can inkway, inkway)

Send your University Public Relations your pithy public summaries from social media.

Every tweet and blogpost is vital practice at communicating our science to a broad audience.

Benchmarks

How will I know in five years if Best Practices V1.0 has been a success?

• No manuscript will remain a manuscript more than 1 year (a paper is no longer a manuscript once it is accepted/in print).
• I will spend no more than 30% of my creative energy revising manuscripts.

Until then.