Journal Format

By Kanishk Chaudhary (2018A4PS0481P). He has 2 publications currently under review, and preparing for a conference paper in Belgium.

If you are reading this without referring to the earlier articles, please refer to the earlier articles.

Starting off + Notes

First of all, do proper documentation of your work right from the start of the project. Make proper files and folders on your laptop, collect all data, no matter if you feel that it is irrelevant to your paper, and make research notes. These notes should include the basic information, like the following:

1. What do you aim to do from your research? Do you have any hypothesis/aims which you wish to study?

2. How are you doing it? What are the methods you are using?

3. What libraries, data, software, programming language, etc are you using (if any). In general, how did you generate the results?

4. What do the results, figures and data represent? What do they mean?

5. Do they support your aims?

This list is not exhaustive, but I hope you get the point. It is necessary that you keep making notes before and during your project work, and not procrastinate till the end. You'll miss out on important points then, which can make or break your journal paper.

Another point to remember during your project work - make sure you have added in the correct data and saved them. Your figures (if any) should be of high quality.

Literature Review

What is a literature review? This refers to the necessary, but often boring, part of your project in which you go through past publications and papers on similar topics which you are working on. What's the purpose? Well, even a Nobel Prize winner must go through past papers to get a flavour of the research outcomes in the area, their methodologies, results, and identifying a research gap. Your project's aim should be to fill this research gap. Moreover, journal reviewers would certainly need you to add information related to past research and gaps because any reader of your paper might not know about it.

Some may suggest doing a literature review before you begin your project, some may tell that even after is fine. Ideally, you should collect and read some papers before to understand the domain you're working in, what type of research has already been done, and how you are different from the others.

Keep collecting relevant papers and store them in a folder. Make notes of certain facts or figures from these papers, and add them to your notes. Add the reference as well (can be a rough reference to link your note with the downloaded paper).

Google Scholar is the most common website to search for papers. Just add in your relevant keywords, and Scholar will guide you to other links having papers with those topics. If a paper is not in open access (i.e., the PDF is not openly available), you have the following options:

1. Use your institutional access (if any). BITS has institutional access to *most* journals, but there are still decent chances that you won't get the paper you want.

2. Request the author for access. You can mail them directly saying that you are a student working on a project.

3. Sci-Hub is not a legal and ethical way to access papers.

Starting with your First Draft

At this point, I assume that you have your research notes and literature review prepared. It is recommended that you have your results also noted down, but you can do it alongside drafting your paper as well.

Before starting your draft, select an appropriate journal. You can search "journal" + keywords, and shortlist some appropriate ones. Go through their journal scope (you must choose one which closely matches your research outcomes), the number of editions in a year, review time, publishing house, and impact factor. You can shortlist around 3 and then discuss with your faculty or Prof.

Once you have chosen your journal, carefully go through their instructions for authors. This will include details regarding the manuscript formatting, referencing format, sections to add, etc.

Now I guess you can start making your first draft. There are a few document editors which you can use. MS Word and Google Docs are the two popular options to draft your research paper in. Both include collaborative options if you wish to work with a co-author. If you are a fancy person, even LaTeX is decent (although cumbersome). You can use Texpad or Overleaf to edit your LaTeX document. However, a lot of journals require you to submit in .docx version, which LaTeX doesn't provide, so I won't personally recommend it.

Format of your Draft

Note: Please go through the instructions specific to the journal. This is more of a generalised format.

Suggestion: Go through papers of the journal you're targeting which are within your domain. Their format will give you a really good idea on how to go about drafting your paper.

1. Title and Authors: Check Impact in Projects for a tip on drafting the title. Ideally, you should make the title at the end. For the authors, add their department and university as well, maybe as a footnote.

2. Abstract: This is a summary (of 200-300 words, depends on the journal) of your paper. Make this at the end!

3. Keywords: Relevant topics which can increase the viewability of your paper.

4. Introduction: Introduce the topic of your research, past research, research gaps, your aims and goals, how the paper is divided. You may add the literature review to the introduction, or put it separately.

5. Methodology: Take from your notes.

6. Body of the Paper: This includes your studies and research outcomes. You can divide it into various sections depending upon your use case.

7. Discussion and/or Conclusion: Summarising your results and what inferences can come out of them. Why did the results come as expected? Why didn't they come as expected? What can be learnt from this research? What aims and goals were satisfied? What are the implications of this? Is there any future scope for improvement or additions which can be made in later research projects?

8. Acknowledgements: Shoutout to anyone who indirectly helped in your project, provided suggestions, reviewed your draft, etc. No, I won't suggest adding the Director of BITS, your parents and the Almighty in your acknowledgements.

9. Funding and Conflict of Interests

10. References: Use a particular format (APA/MLA/Harvard style) and stick to it. Add DOI links wherever you can. If you accessed from a website that is not a DOI link, add "Retrieved <Month> <DD>, <YYYY> from <link>" to the end of the reference.

11. Appendix (if any): Calculations, code, large datasets, etc.

12. Tables and Figures: Most journals want these at the end of your manuscript. You can put Tables first, and then Figures (one page for each table and figure)

Tips and Suggestions

1. Contrary to popular opinion, TechRe is important!

2. Once you select a journal, collect papers from it which you can add to your literature review or references. Journals like it when you refer to their own papers. Also, the formatting in these papers will help you a lot in drafting.

3. In-text citations are important. If you collect a fact or summarise a paper, add the in-text citation to the end!

4. Reference formatting: I personally prefer APA, but check first if the journal has anything specific or not.

5. Ensure that a) all your in-text citations have a reference b) all your references have an in-text citation c) you haven't missed out or unnecessarily added any reference.

6. Get your whole doc checked by Grammarly and correct your mistakes. Grammarly has free add-ons for Google Docs and MS Word, please use it.

7. Get your whole doc checked for any plagiarism.

8. Maintain your fonts, size, colour, etc. throughout the document.

9. Your tables and figures should be well labelled, captioned, and of high quality. Blurry figures will get your paper rejected.

10. Each table and figure should have a mention in your text, like "as can be seen in Figure 1".

11. Proof-read. Proof-read. Proof-read. Your first draft should not be your last!

If I think of anything else, I'll add it here. Till then, all the best!