Over the course of an academic career, you accumulate a variety of hats for different roles. My latest was becoming a journal editor, first for the RSC and then for the ACS.
There are many ongoing developments in scientific publishing, including the transition from subscription to open access, the incorporation of open science and open data protocols, and the options between different flavours of peer review such as blind, open, and post-print. But today, I have more practical points in mind based on experience over my first three years.
Given the era, I first asked my friend ChatGPT (whose skills at contributing to scientific writing are being recognised):
Q. Top 5 tips for an author of manuscripts from the perspective of an editor.
1. Follow the guidelines of the journal you are submitting to.
2. Clearly and concisely communicate your research.
3. Include all necessary information.
4. Address any potential issues or criticisms.
5. Have your work professionally edited.
… a little generic. There are many formal resources available including A Virtual Issue of Editor Tips for Authors Mastering the Art of Scientific Publication, Author Lab and Reviewer Lab hosted by ACS.
JACS aims for a general chemistry audience. In doing so, there is a selection process where all submissions are screened. Each manuscript is usually assessed by two academic editors. An executive editor performs a first screening for scope before passing it to an associate editor knowledgeable in that subject. The manuscript is then either sent for peer review, recommended for transfer to another journal, or rejected.
My personal screening process is to first open the manuscript file. The three important first impressions are: Title, Abstract, and Figures. I only find a Cover Letter useful for extra context for the study, especially when it appears not a good to be a good fit for the journal or has similar conclusions to recently published work.
A few tips to get the editor on your side:
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Suggest a diverse set of reviewers with justification. Rather than including the “big names” who are likely overcommitted, think of some early or mid-career researchers in your field. Adding a few words of justification (e.g. an “expert in inelastic X-ray scattering”) helps a lot and will reduce the processing time of your manuscript.
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Don’t oversell your findings. No one study solves all problems in a field. It is best to be open with the progress made, to be critical on the limitations of the study and the open challenges. This will help to get editors and reviewers on your side. If I had a penny for every “highly efficient” or “exceptional” catalyst I read about, I could almost afford a tube ticket to the office.
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Facilitate reproducible and reusable research. The more open a study is about its methods and data, the more confident I can be in its findings. The ACS “strongly encourage authors to make the research data underlying their articles publicly available at the time of publication”; see the Research Data Policy. The specific approach is quite subject-dependent, and it is an area where publishers must do more to support authors, but for machine learning studies I have written on some useful protocols over here.
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Polish your text, figures, and references. Back in the day, most journals used the services of hands-on copy editors that would sand down the rough edges of each accepted manuscript, including grammar fixes and figure edits. These days it is a rarity at society journals, so it’s up to the authors. My most common requests relate to font sizes in figures, which sometimes vary by orders of magnitude. It is best to aim for a uniform font size and style that can be read at journal scale. There is some useful figure advice by my friends Ram Seshadri and Chris Hendon, with much more hidden around the internet.
Finally, ACS Energy Letters has had a series of thought-provoking editorials on different aspects of scientific publishing with direct author advice. Some recent ones that I recommend are Fewer Sandwich Papers, Please and How To Submit a Previously Rejected Manuscript.