As an author, I have realised that our results are accepted as a scientific publication on the basis of innovative experiments and techniques.
The documentation produced for submission to journals has to be written in a well structured way that are concise, logical and explained in a manner that can be is easily understood by all audiences both scientific and medical.
In order to achieve the desired level; the article should therefore consist of diagrams, tables and well thought out explanations. The authors should communicate and justify their findings completely and accurately.
Firstly, the quality of a publication can be assessed by the ability of the authors to convey their initial messages in a well written abstract. It is very much like a precis. A precis is a summary of a detailed document like a headline or the opening sentences of a newspaper. This is where an author should make use of their skills to attract their audiences. A good summary should make a less interested reader read at least some part of the paper. This is where the authors sell the paper to the referee or editor for getting their work published in high impact journals.
In order to make a judgement of the remaining document, quality can be classified in simple categories depending on clarity, details, quality and design of the experiments, and richness of the arguments. The classifications are as follow;
Exceptional: The designs of the experiments are novel, well thought out and the experiments produced are of exceptional quality and no such scientific research have been previously been produced. There is good correlation between the citations and the text. The results are critically evaluated with references to previous work. The paper actually justifies discussion.
Good to acceptable: The article is well articulated and presented in concise and logical way. The experiments are well thought out, the quality of the experiments are decent and carried out several times to establish justification with statistics.
Poor: Even if the experiments are of good quality and potentially useful, a poorly written article with several grammatical errors can be rejected by the editors. The authors have not read the “instructions to authors section”. It seems as if it’s a trial and error exercise to get their work published. It would be most appropriate to approach a scientific communications expert or a technical writer on such occasions.
