Hi,
I wish to publish a paper but as a beginner I don't find my paper of a very high quality so that well known journals would like to publish it. I'm a master's student in biostatistics and my professor suggested me not develop a statistical method because it would be very difficult and time consuming for masters' student and asked me to do so for my PhD dissertation. Besides, he suggested me apply some existing statistical models on real datasets and discuss the results. This is how not all but most of masters' students in biostatistics carry out their thesis as far as I know. Others might develop something very simple if possible.
Now, the problem is there was not any real datasets that I could apply the existing methods on them, so we had to use some public data on ncbi. As you know, public datasets have already been discussed so to have some novelty, we decided to compare some existing statistical models on two real public datasets. But you know, that seems meaningless to me to just discuss the results of those models on two datasets when we don't have any measurement to compare the models.
I don't know if this paper can ever be published so I'm losing my confidence. Do you know any good and acceptable enough journal where a beginner can publish a paper?
Here, as I know, masters' students should be able to apply current models on data correctly. This is what's expected from them.
Thank you
How about F1000 research?
That sound a very good journal. It's indexed in pubmed and it seems good enough for beginners. I have it as an option but since the university will pay the fees only for ISI journals, I'm trying to find as many journals as possible to finally choose the one with minimum fee that I can afford in case my professor doesn't pay the fee himself.
Another one that may be a good fit is PeerJ.
Is peer review important? I'd just use bioRxiv...
Thank you so much. I read into it. As you said papers are not peer-reviewed. how long do they take to accept or reject a paper? Yeah. I think peer review is important to acknowledge your paper. A journal being indexed in at least Pubmed or Scopus seems a good idea. But I consider this journal as on option too. Thank you very much.
It's not a "journal". It's a repository for preprints, which you may or may not want to publish in a "real" journal afterwards. Publication is free and takes about 1 day. Everything is accepted, except spam/pseudoscience/plagiarism/...
I can't judge the quality of your work, but getting something published as a master student doesn't happen in my institution. If you want to get some exposure, biorxiv could work. Your preprint gets a DOI and can get cited.
Oh, I guess I understand it now. You mean that I can publish paper on that repository and probably get some comments from the readers and whenever I want I can publish that paper in some journal too? That sounds great. I had never heard of repositories before.
Yes, I have just put a paper there: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/26/271411
It can be accepted in as little as 1 day. Also, bioRxiv provides a 'transfer' service whereby you can actually later submit your paper for peer review to other journals.
Make sure if you have a particular journal in mind that they accept preprints. Many many journals currently do. I've put my paper on BioRxiv 3 months before it got "really" published and it has been read 900+ times in that time.
It's also a method to accelerate science. What's the point in waiting more than a year to get your (revolutionary) research out?
heref : Keep in mind that if you are required to "publish" your paper as a part of completion of requirements for your degree then submission to bioRxiv may not count.
Both your statements may happen, but:
1) Most pre-print papers don't get any feedback;
2) Not all journals are ok with pre-prints, some may consider the paper is not original anymore.
This article is about peer-review in general, but discusses pre-print manuscripts:
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-end-of-an-error-peer-review/
List of journals and their preprint policy
It's hard to give precise advice without much information. I gather that you've written a paper about some statistical method(s ?) that you've applied to some public data sets. To make it publishable, you need at least one of:
1- presents a new method, compares it to state of the art methods for addressing the same question/problem and finds that it has some advantages/benefits (at least in some cases)
2- provides new (biological) insight from the analyzed data
Where to publish and how easy it will be to publish will depend on whether you have 1, 2, both or none.
I think there is a third:
3) provide unbiased, extensive and high-quality evaluation of existing methods, providing independent guidance for users - new methods are always "best" at something, and independent evaluation is really useful.
Yes. Good point.
Yes, exactly.
I have compared two statistical models. To compare them, I decided to apply three benchmark methods and then consider the overlapped results of those three benchmark methods as a measurement for comparison of those two models. The two models haven't been compared before. But this measurement is not accurate because benchmark methods have a positive FDR and though we can reduce the FDR by using the overlapping results of the bencmark methods, the FDR won't reduce to zero. That is why comparing two models based on that measurement is not accurate enough. High quality papers usually simulate data to have an accurate comparison.
To discuss the new biological insights from the data, I have consulted with some experts in that field but there is not much left to find on public data.