How to Design A Research Study To Get Published: Foolproof Way to Ensure You Get a Publication
This proactive approach can save you months, or even years, of time that might otherwise be wasted on dead-ends.
In business, the key factors contributing to success are capital, sales, and growth. Academics is different.
The factors that contribute to a success research laboratory or group are grant awards and high impact publications. Principal Investigators need high impact publications.
But when you’re designing a study you might think, how can I be sure I’ll get a high-impact paper? You’re right. It’s not that easy. And to graduate you need publications. In this article we’ll discuss a way to ensure publication regardless of the impact of the result.
First, let’s discuss impact factor.
First, what is the impact factor (IF)?
According to ChatGPT 4.0, the impact factor is: “a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in a journal.”
(PhDonTrack.com)
In other words, you can calculate the IF for a particular journal by dividing the number of citations in the current year to articles published in the two previous years by the total number of articles published in the two previous years.
For example, if a journal has an impact factor of 3 in 2020, that means, on average, the articles published in 2018 and 2019 received three citations each in 2020.
The best journal IFs are shown in this list below, which lists journals in order of IF for 2022.
Journal name (IF 2022) (Web of Science, June 2023)
LANCET (168.9)
NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE (158.5)
JAMA-JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION (120.7)
NATURE REVIEWS DRUG DISCOVERY (120.1)
NATURE REVIEWS MOLECULAR CELL BIOLOGY (112.7)
BMJ-British Medical Journal (105.7)
NATURE REVIEWS IMMUNOLOGY (100.3)
NATURE REVIEWS MICROBIOLOGY (88.1)
Nature Reviews Materials (83.5)
NATURE MEDICINE (82.9)
Nature Reviews Disease Primers (81.5)
Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology (78.8)
NATURE REVIEWS CANCER (78.5)
Lancet Respiratory Medicine (76.2)
World Psychiatry (73.3)
Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology (65.1)
NATURE (64.8)
CELL (64.5)
Lancet Psychiatry (64.3)
CHEMICAL REVIEWS (62.1)
How do you ensure you get a publication?
Okay, with the method in this article, you may not ensure a journal publication in a high IF article like the ones listed above. Instead, this method is used to try and guarantee a publication.
Guaranteeing a publication?
The above journals with the highest IFs are nearly impossible to get into. The research findings need to be landmark and push the field forward. And as you can imagine, not everyones research will do that. Some studies will fail and have the negative results.
Publishing negative results is not sexy science but you need to graduate and not waste time.
Of course, no one wants a negative result or a result that leads them to publish something not super groundbreaking. BUT! It’s still important. And you need to graduate.
Taken together, since you need to finish your work by a certain timeframe, and you cannot stay in a PhD forever, you must publish the research from what you have.
Let’s get into how you ensure you have a journal publication.
The contents of this concept were first presented in my book, “How to Make A PhD Work: A Guide for Creating a Career in Science and Engineering” For more information about this, you can read Chapter 13, section 6.
Step 1: Consider the article’s figures before starting the research.
Okay, let’s get into it!
Before you even begin writing your research paper or conducting your experiment, begin by thinking about the figures you will need to tell a complete story. Or in other words, which figures will answer the hypothesis?
To do this, plan the figures that will be required to support your findings and get your paper published. Most journal articles require more than 4 figures to be deemed a worthy finding with enough supporting evidence. On average, most articles use 6 figures to tell the story of their research.
As you start to layout the figures you will be able to see whether you are able to answer the hypothesis you are working on. In this foolproof way, regardless of the result - groundbreaking or not - you can publish the findings. And eureka! the findings will answer the hypothesis. And no matter what the results are, sexy or not, they can still be published in a journal, even if they are not going in one with the highest IF.
Step 2: Use the tools available to you to decide on the figures you need to tell the story.
How do you decide on the figures?
When deciding on the graphs, images, tables, or diagrams that will go in your paper, consider the tools and equipment you have at your disposal. Ask yourself the following questions:
Which tools might you use to tell the story?
What figure would each tool generate (e.g., graph, image, table, diagram)?
What is the one figure you need to complete the story? What are the supporting figures that will answer the hypothesis?
This proactive approach can save you months, or even years, of time that might otherwise be wasted on dead ends. Plus, it gives you a framework to work within to ensure you are moving towards a result that can help you garner academic prestige through an eventual publication.
Example
I used this approach when researching the role of primary cilia in bone marrow cells in sensing mechanical stimulation applied to porous bone. We were curious to know whether the primary cilia was responsible for sensing the mechanical deformation to the surrounding bone and the subsequent small micro-motions that would occur afterward. As we started these experiments, a postdoc, notified me to lay out the figures ahead of time. I went through and started to think about what story could I tell and how could I convince a reviewer that my results were meaningful. I thought of the tools I had available.
I was conducting experiments on porous bone tissue cores and would be able to demineralize them and then conduct histology on them, and then I could also try to section them for immunohistochemistry. So I thought, well I could calculate the bone’s calcified surfaces and then do immunohistochemistry on the bone tissue to show the change in primary cilia formation before and after mechanical stimulation (left is a picture of a primary cilia). That worked. Counting and measuring the primary cilia was a completely separate issue.
In this publication, we discovered that primary cilia did respond to mechanical stimulation in this novel bioreactor system. However, we could not prove that the primary cilia was responsible for bone formation or was the only factor involved in sensing mechanical stimulation.
In this publication (Coughlin TR et al. 2013),
Figure 1 was our bioreactor setup,
Figure 2 showed our schedule for applying mechanical stimulation,
Figure 3 showed that the bioreactor kept the stem cells in the bone marrow alive, and thus was a useful apparatus,
Figure 4, showed the way we removed primary cilia from the cells for our knockdown method,
Figure 5, demonstrated how we stained the primary cilia with fluorescence and counted the number of cilia in each group,
Figure 6, analyzed the change in stem-ness of the different groups,
Figure 7, analyzed the bone formation in each group,
Figure 8, demonstrated the change in fat content in each group, and
Figure 9, showed the changes in shear stress within the bone marrow using a computational model.
The article was published in European Cells and Materials, which has an IF of 3.1 (Bioxbio.com)
Conclusion
In conclusion, getting your research study published in a reputable journal requires careful planning and a strategic approach. By following the tips outlined in "How to Make Your PhD Work: A Guide for Creating a Career in Science and Engineering," you can increase your chances of success and make the most of your PhD or postdoc experience. Remember, the key is to start with the end in mind and plan your figures carefully to tell a compelling story that will capture the attention of journal editors and reviewers.
References
1. PhDonTrack. Citation Impact. <www.phdontrack.net/share-and-publish/citation-impact/>
2. Web of Science. The top 20 highest-impact factor journals according to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR 2022), published by Clarivate Analytics. (June 2023). <www.wos-journal.info/blog/the-top-20-highest-impact-factor-journals-according-to-the-journal-citation-reports-jcr-2022-published-by-clarivate-analytics-in-2023/>
3. Coughlin TR, Schiavi J, Alyssa Varsanik M, et al. Primary cilia expression in bone marrow in response to mechanical stimulation in explant bioreactor culture. Eur Cell Mater. 2016;32:111-122. Published 2016 Jul 19. doi:10.22203/ecm.v032a07
4. Bioxbio.com. <https://www.bioxbio.com/journal/EUR-CELLS-MATER>