Publishing your first research paper can be intimidating. There’s just so much to do, and you do not know where to start. In this video, we’re going to talk about the process of publishing a research paper, what you should go for—conferences or journals—and finally, we’re also going to be talking about whether paid journals are worth it and whether should you go for paid or unpaid journals.
By the way, did you know that publishing a research paper typically takes from three months to one year? Yes, it can be pretty time-consuming, and this excludes the time you take out to work through these details and build your project—the research project that is.
Well, no worries. We’re going to make sure that we understand how to fasten the process as well in this video.
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Step 1: Select a Research Problem.
The most common way of distributing an examination paper now — you could be aware there are a ton of kinds of papers, yet the ones that I believe are the most discussed, the most well known, are, regardless of whether I’m simply extensively ordering them, the main is the survey paper.
Okay, what is the review paper? The review paper is basically when you understand that, “Alright, this is a research problem, and I would like to see what other people have done, the approaches that they have taken.” You read all the papers, and you compile everything into one.
The other thing that you do, which is likewise similar to an undeniable exploration paper, is where you essentially finish the entire course of really distributing an examination paper or truly doing the venture that will be distributed as an exploration paper.
Now, I’m going to be telling you these steps for that. Let’s just call it a full-fledged research paper, okay? Now, to go about that, the first thing you should do is to select a research problem.
What everyone else in your field is dealing with could be a very familiar problem, or you could go down very deep. It could even be an analysis, for instance. You get a lot of data from Twitter, and you can then just run some analysis on it. Even that can be a very good candidate for a paper. By the way, did you know that I published three research papers before these? So that’s where I’m getting the experience from. Two of those, I could as you can find in the screenshots; they’re already on some websites, but the third one I couldn’t find them. That’s something that I just wanted to share with you guys, thought you would enjoy it. So yes, analysis papers are also very crucial; they happen all the time.
Okay, so the number one step, like I talked about, was to select a research problem.
The subsequent stage is to peruse the audit papers. Like I said, those audit papers — which I’ve previously tried out — that, “Okay, these are the most well-known approaches, one, two, three. These methodologies are as of now taken by the creators from one side of the planet to the other.” Okay, so you finally found out, “Alright, these are the things that have already been done.” You understand that, “Okay, maybe we can solve it in this way or this way.” And then once you know all of the ways, the third step comes in, which is to find a better solution. Now, you need to find a better solution and compare it with all the other solutions out there.
Okay, you can run an analysis based on any sort of efficiency measures that you would be using in your scenario. So, to do that, maybe because you read a lot of research papers or you read a lot of review papers before, you already know that “Alright, maybe I can merge these two processes.
You know, Author One from Paper One was doing this, and Author Two from Paper Two was doing this, and maybe if I just merge these, the process becomes a lot more efficient. Hey, that might work,” something like that often comes around. And with that, you can easily find a better solution, and then you can compare and contrast it and run the analysis with the other papers that have already been published by the other authors.
Okay, once you get to the stage where you officially have a research paper candidate in your hand you can do that.
You can publish that. To do that, here comes Step Number Four: You have to find a conference or a journal. Remember, a lot of things are—this is very deep; we can talk about edge index, we can talk about a lot of other things—but one thing that maybe you can look at as a starter when you’re publishing your first research paper is the impact factor. The impact factor—the higher, the better.
Okay, however, I cannot say that the impact factor is very, very relevant to the fields. Okay, so maybe in computer science, the impact factor of four would be good, but in agriculture, maybe the impact factor of four is not so good.
Maybe it needs to be as high as ten. So it completely depends on the area that you are working in. Alright, and when you’re taking a look at the impact factor, I would suggest taking a look at Scopus-based journals—, Scopus-indexed journals—because those impact factors are pretty much verifiable. They are relevant; they’re true.
Okay, there are a lot of other indexes out there. Do not follow a lot of other indexes. There are some good ones as well; I’m pretty sure Thomson Reuters is a pretty good one.
But I would say, just try to stick to Scopus if possible in the beginning.
Now, after you select the journal, after you know, “Alright, this is the journal I want to publish my research paper in,” you go on to their website.
You get the format that they want you to put the paper in. So every journal would have a format that they want you to sort of make your paper into. So you have to convert your paper into their format. Once you find it, it may be a LaTeX document, it may be just a Word document. You write your paper down in the same format.
With that done, we can now finally move on to Step Number Six, which is to submit your paper for review. Now, this is probably the
last step you can see over here. You submit it for review. But hey, it’s not as easy as that. Once they review it, they might have some changes; they might want to make some fixes. So yeah, the process may go through a little bit, but after reading through it maybe two or three times, your paper should be pretty much ready, and you should be able to be in a position where you can just go on and publish it at this point.
Okay, now that’s everything that I wanted you to know about the process of publishing. I know I did not go very deep because this is probably for the people who are watching it for the first time—basically, they want to publish their first research paper—and I think this much information should be enough. Of course, if you want to go deep, there’s probably no limit to how deep you can go.
Common Questions
Okay, now I’m going to go over some of the most commonly asked questions. The one thing that we’re going to cover here is: Should you go for journal or conference papers?
Okay, now I’m going to go over these very briefly. I think that the journal papers just take longer to publish. So if you have some time on your hands—maybe eight, nine months, or more—then you should go for journal papers. Of course, journal papers are the count, and this is there are exceptions, but usually, they count twice as much as compared to a conference paper.
So yeah, that might be it. However, if you think your paper is not good enough, or our research is not good enough, in that case, you can just go on for a conference paper where you will be in the presence of a lot of researchers, and you’ll maybe gain more experience before you move on to your first journal paper.
Okay, and finally, there’s another thing that you know, journal papers are peer-reviewed, so you can basically sort of guarantee that the quality over there would be higher. Again, like I said, there are exceptions, but in this case, journal papers generally typically take the lead.
Okay, the other thing that I wanted to talk about was another one of your most common doubts, and that is: Should we go for a paid journal or should we go for a free journal, where you do not have to pay?
Well, I would suggest that you know think about it this way: If you’re just paying someone to publish your paper, it’s not as good as publishing it in an unpaid one. Not just because you’re paying someone. Hey, some people pay a lot of money; there are reasons for that. But I would say at first, try to go for an unpaid journal if you have the time. That is, if you do not have time, then just go for a paid one. Paid ones do not hold as much value, by the way, as the unpaid ones. That is for sure.
Okay, they might show you a higher impact factor, again, they may—the impact factor will usually not be Scopus-indexed, as far as I know. And the paid ones would just be in the business of publishing your paper and making money. If they tell you that the cost of publishing a paper is a hundred dollars, you say, “Hey, I cannot afford that much,” and they would just reply, they would probably tell you, “Hey, we’re going to give you a 50% discount; you can publish it at fifty.” So yeah, that’s something that happens a lot in paid journals.
But one thing is that you know, they usually can have more reach as compared to some of the lower-level unpaid journals. So your paper gets basically in front of more eyes, and secondly, it’s easier to publish over there. Of course, it is also faster to publish over there. But usually, they are worthless in most cases, and if you just need to show someone that you know, “Hey, I’ve published a research paper,” then you can use it. But if they’re someone who is a pro at this, they already know everything about it. They would find it wouldn’t take them more than five minutes to find out that the journal quality is not that good.
Outro
Yeah, that’s everything I want to talk to you about regarding publishing research papers. Now, if you would like to connect with other applicants who are going for their studies all over the world, we have built a social network for you. It’s called ymgrad.com. You can go ahead and do that. However, one thing: if you do not want to publish research papers on your own but you do need them, I just want to point out that we do have a service on our services page where we can help you publish those research papers. So be sure to check that out on ymgrad.com/service, and you’ll be able to directly work with me for your research papers if that’s something that you’re interested in.
Again, I hope that this process helped you out, and I wish you all the best in publishing your first research paper. Do comment down below once you do publish one, and I would love to see the link to one. Maybe. Alright, have a good day. I’ll see you in the next one.