Abstract
This chapter covers briefly several topics related to the publishing process in scientific journals. Several stages of the publishing process, starting from the manuscript preparation, to the submission, the review process etc., are briefly explained in order to illustrate the time frame for a publication. Different concepts for the review process, i.e. single-blind, double-blind and open review, are introduced. Several subsections cover different parts of a manuscript. It is not a guideline on ‘how to write a journal paper’ but useful comments and suggestions are provided. The final part of this chapter covers questions related to the submission and revision of a journal manuscript.
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Notes
- 1.
The majority of submissions should not be prepared in the final layout and should contain only very basic formatting features.
- 2.
Final layout refers here to a print or PDF version. In the case of a HTML or EPUB version, there is no final layout but the production unit still must do some editing.
- 3.
It is common that the publishers add numbered lines to ease reference to any passage to be corrected.
- 4.
Each article may simply start with page 1.
- 5.
It is in this case required that the authors prepare a version without authors and affiliations on the first page. However, the author might be disclosed by the literature review or literature section where the own previous work is mentioned.
- 6.
Some of the journals which perform an open peer review publish on the first page of an article the names and affiliations of the reviewers.
- 7.
About 60 % of the submitted manuscripts to Nature are rejected by the editors without further peer-review.
- 8.
Some authors separate an own section for results and afterwards a section on discussion. However, it might be useful to immediately explain the findings where they are presented and described.
- 9.
“
is a comprehensive set of markup commands used with the powerful typesetting program 
for the preparation of a wide variety of documents, from scientific articles, reports, to complex books”[16]. Writing manuscripts in 
is similar to HTML programming. - 10.
Some recommendations will be different from publisher to publisher. In any case, an author should carefully check the specific instructions for authors for the selected journal or book.
- 11.
Variables of higher dimension with rows and columns.
- 12.
The original name is known in French as: Système International d’Unités.
- 13.
More information on units can be found in the brochures of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM): www.bipm.org/en/si.
- 14.
However, color figures are nowadays available in the online version of journals.
- 15.
Some of these criteria can be simply checked in the scientific databases, see Chap. 5.
is a comprehensive set of markup commands used with the powerful typesetting program 
for the preparation of a wide variety of documents, from scientific articles, reports, to complex books”[
is similar to HTML programming.References
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Öchsner, A. (2013). Publishing in Scientific Journals. In: Introduction to Scientific Publishing. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38646-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38646-6_7
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