This post is devoted to some thoughts and ideas about what one should think about before submitting a manuscript to an international scientific journal or a conference presentation.
Why should I publish a paper?
Historically, before the 20th century, the scientific community was quite small and almost entirely composed of men working in Europe or North America. At that time, scientists exchanged information and knowledge through personal letters, meetings at scientific academies, research visits, and printed books. Papers in scientific journals started to appear and gain relevance later.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is claimed to be the world’s first scientific journal (see, e.g., https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publishing350/history-philosophical-transactions/), launched in 1665.
For at least a couple of centuries, scientific journals had been published by academies; the papers were mostly texts of lectures and conferences or were “presented” by one of the members of the academies.
For instance, W.O. Kermack and A.G. McKendrick published their seminal paper “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Epidemics”, which is the basis of many models of epidemic spread were successively developed, in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character, on August 1, 1927. The subtitle of the paper states: “Communicated by Sir Gilbert Walker, F.R.S.-Received May 13, 1927”.
Peer review started in the 20th century when the scientific community increased its size. For some decades, the peer review system had been forcing scholars to prepare manuscripts and submit them to international scientific journals, only if their results were innovative.
In the last few decades, things have changed. Scientists are presently “obliged” to publish for different reasons, mostly related to their careers.
Some universities require that Ph.D. students publish a minimum number of papers in international scientific journals before admitting them to the final defence of their Ph.D. thesis. Moreover, in several cases, Ph.D. theses are nothing but collections of published papers.
Early-stage post-doc researchers are forced to publish their results because their career depends on the increase of the bibliometric indicators of their scientific production.
Senior researchers are forced to keep the bibliometric indicators of their scientific production high enough in order to compete for research grants and to guarantee that the institutions where they work can be highly ranked.
I am simplifying things here, but I think it is not too far from the truth of the remark that nowadays, the submission of manuscripts is aimed more at supporting researchers’ careers and institutions’ rankings than at disseminating innovative results among the scientific community.
Which kind of paper should I publish?
Different scientific journals publish diverse kinds of articles. Some types are very specific for some research fields, e.g., clinical tests in medical sciences, and case or law commentaries in legal science. But, if the focus is on natural or “hard” sciences, the following kinds of papers are generally published.
Research articles are papers that convey innovative results of general interest. In particular, such papers should propose new methods to solve open scientific questions.
Technical notes should be short articles that describe practical aspects for the application of a methodology or minor developments and improvements of an already published methodology.
Reports show case studies, where conventional, well-established, or recently proposed methods are applied or tested, possibly in complex conditions. This is a kind of papers which could be promoted by international journals to disseminate experimental results or monitoring data that can provide insights (confirmation or possible rejection) on fenomenological laws or theories.
Review papers provide a comprehensive description of a research field or theme. Recently, I have been asked to review manuscripts that were submitted to be published as review papers; unfortunately, they often were nothing but a list of papers on a relatively specific topic. Instead, review papers should provide an innovative view of the treated subject, or should clearly emphasize the strengths and weaknesses of the methods proposed for the solution of scientific problems.
Essays propose authors’ views on scientific problems and approaches or topics related to science policies. Somehow, the content of this blog includes possible essay subjects!
Finally, comments and replies are very short discussions related to an article published in scientific journals. It would be very important—I would say, mandatory—for every journal to provide an open discussion of published papers. There are several examples when such discussions led to the discovery of plagiarism, fixing formal or trivial mistakes, or enriching scientific knowledge, as well as providing different views on a research topic.
Due to the continuous growth of scientific fields , it is very important that researchers, when preparing a manuscript, first of all, consider whether their work can be considered for publication as a research paper, or, rather, as a technical note or a report.
My personal experience is that many, possibly most, of the manuscripts that I am asked to assess as a referee are indeed either technical notes (where the authors propose specific improvements of a methodology already developed) or reports (devoted to applications of well-established or even recently published methods to a specific data set, or to a specific study case).
Therefore, it would be a good practice to carefully answer the following questions, before submitting a manuscript for publication: Is the manuscript describing a truly innovative approach? Is the work incremental? Is the work an application of consolidated methods? If the manuscript is intended to be a review paper, does it provide an original view on the topic, or is it merely a list of relevant papers?
Sincere answers to these questions could help the authors to write manuscripts in a better way, submit them in the most appropriate form, and, as I discuss below, to the most appropriate journal.
Where should I publish?
Everybody wants to publish in high-quality journals. So, which tools or procedures should be applied to assess a scientific journal’s quality?
Several bibliometric indicators are commonly used to rank scientific journals in different disciplines or among multidisciplinary journals. These indicators are often considered measures of the reputation of a journal. But, in a more rigorous sense, they are indicators of the exposure of journals in the scientific community.
When I try to assess the quality of a journal, I check if the editorial board includes colleagues who I consider to be top scientists in our research field, and I check the quality of its published papers.
Another aspect that should be considered when submitting a manuscript is the connection between the topic of the work and the scope of the journal. Unfortunately, I am often asked to review manuscripts that deal with topics in my research field or that apply methods and techniques that I know very well within particular conditions, but that are submitted to journals whose goals are quite far from that.
In most of these cases, the manuscript is masked under the guise of being an interdisciplinary work. I strongly appreciate interdisciplinary research, but that is another story. Those papers often show that the authors either have a poor knowledge of the applied techniques or use those tools and methods in an uninformed way.
Basically, those manuscripts would be rejected by high-quality journals that use researchers with strong experience and knowledge of the applied methods, but are submitted to other journals with the hope of finding referees who are indulgent or not very critical.
Therefore, selecting the best journal to which a manuscript is submitted requires the following:
- Checking the aims and scope of the journal;
- Assessing the quality of the journal, based not only on the bibliometric indicators, but also on the quality of the published papers and the international recognition of the editorial board;
- Performing a sincere and genuine assessment of the innovative content of the work to be submitted;
- Checking the types of papers that are published by the journal.
The best choice can be based on a serious and careful application of this procedure.
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Last updated on: July 25, 2026