I Have a Research Support System

Xu Qiu, Chen Wanqing, Wu Feifei and Duan Yun came to the 218 office.

Wei Xingsi asked them if he had bought a ticket to go home, and after getting a positive answer, he nodded and said:

Come over tomorrow to clean up the lab. We will be officially on vacation. There are 15 days of summer vacation. You must come back on time on August 15th.

After he finished speaking, he waited for a few seconds, and seeing that there were no objections from the crowd, he continued:

That's it. Go out to eat tonight. How much did you spend in the end? Wu Feifei, please tell me, and I'll pass it on to you.

Okay. Wu Feifei said.

…………

Everyone returned to room 216.

Finally it's a holiday! Duan Yun said happily, Tonight the boss treats guests, what are we going to eat tonight?

I'm free, just remember to control the budget, about 70 per capita. Wu Feifei said.

I'm free too, Xu Qiu, what about you? Chen Wanqing said.

It's up to you to decide, Xu Qiu said.

Why don't we go to the fusion restaurant last time? Red Pepper, Duan Yun said, If each person orders rice, the budget should not be exceeded.

Red pepper, is it a fusion dish? Xu Qiu asked doubtfully.

It should be called... Chen Wanqing thought for a while and said, Fusion Sichuan cuisine?

I've eaten at that one, and it tastes okay. Xu Qiu said, By the way, do you all like Sichuan food?

The main reason is that Mr. Wei likes to eat. Every time he takes us out for dinner, he always goes to a Sichuan restaurant. Over time, we all get used to it, Wu Feifei spread her hands and said:

I didn't eat spicy food before I came to Shanghai.

That's it for the dinner location.

However, it's early five o'clock in the afternoon, and it takes more than twenty minutes to get off work.

Xu Qiu also didn't have the heart to code his thesis, so he leaned over to Chen Wanqing and asked:

Senior sister, tell me about the process of paper submission.

Alright, Chen Wanqing happened to have nothing else to do, so she said:

You have seen the previous process. After the article is written, find the corresponding website for the journal you want to submit to, click to enter the submission interface, and then fill in various information and submit it.

What about Cover Letter? Xu Qiu asked, I've never heard of this stuff before.

This one is for the editor, mainly to introduce the highlights of this article, Chen Wanqing said:

The content inside can be exaggerated appropriately, because it will not appear in the final text, and in most cases it will not be seen by reviewers.

Usually, after the editor has seen the Cover Letter and the title, he or she will generally judge whether the article is worth publishing.

He will continue to read the text only if he thinks it is valuable, and after reading the text, he will judge again.

If you look at it comprehensively, the editor feels that the article is worthless, and may directly reject the manuscript, or may suggest that you switch to other journals under their company, and generally recommend new journals or junk journals.

In both cases, the editor will get back to you fairly quickly, usually within a week or two.

However, for journals with a very slow review cycle such as Nature, it is difficult to say when the information will be available.

If the editor judges that the article is worthy of publication, he will arrange peer review for you based on the keywords you provide, expected reviewers, unwanted reviewers, etc. information.

Because the review of papers is highly subjective, and the reviewers are free and voluntary labor, some people are unwilling to review manuscripts or have no time to review manuscripts.

Therefore, three reviewers are generally selected, and occasionally there are two reviewers. Some better journals will select five or more reviewers.

After reviewing the manuscript, the reviewers will return their comments to the editor. After the editor gets all the comments of the reviewers, he will refer to their opinions and decide how to deal with the submission.

The first is direct acceptance, which is very unlikely. Generally, this happens because the vote is low, that is, the value of the article is higher than the journal grade;

The second is minor revisions. Generally, some phenomena are not clearly explained, and some descriptions need to be added, or a small amount of experiments need to be added;

The third type is a major change, which usually requires a large number of experiments or descriptions to be added;

The last one is to reject the manuscript or suggest to transfer to other journals.

After the editor has decided what to do with the submission, the results will be communicated back to the contributor.

If it is directly accepting or rejecting the manuscript, it goes without saying.

In case of small or major revisions, the contributors need to refer to the reviewers' comments, answer every question they raise, and supplement experiments or revise the content of the article.

If you encounter a question that cannot be answered or a place that cannot be modified, you must give a reasonable reason.

Once this is all in place, the contributor sends the revised version to the editor along with responses to the reviewers' comments.

The editor decides to accept it directly, or send your article to the reviewers for review. If it is the latter, the article will usually return to the original reviewer by the same route.

Then it goes on like this until eventually the editor accepts the manuscript, or rejects you.

It turns out that there are still so many things to do after the article is submitted, Xu Qiu asked:

Then what should you do if the reviewer finds you unhappy, you keep revising, and he keeps rejecting you?

Actually, the reviewers are not that important. It is not the reviewers who decide the fate of the article, but the editor. Chen Wanqing said:

If the editor is optimistic, he can ignore the negative opinions of the reviewers and let you pass the manuscript directly. Those who can be editors still have basic judgment ability.

Besides, there are so many journals now, even if this one is rejected, just go to another one and submit to the same grade.

Like our research group, we usually vote for three companies: ACS, RSC and Wiely. Mr. Wei is biased against Elsevier, so he generally does not consider its journals.

Each company has a number of journals of different grades to choose from.

However, after the article is submitted to the journal company, they will have a record. Unless the editor is resubmitting, if the article is submitted to other journals of their company again, the acceptance rate will not be high.

Therefore, our articles generally only have three opportunities for submission, that is, the three companies submit in turn.

If you are rejected for the second time, you will select for a relatively poor journal for the third time.

In addition, the formats of the three companies are different, and the format must be changed before each submission.

Otherwise, if you use the ACS format to submit to RSC journals, the editor will reject the manuscript directly if the format is incorrect.

Like the article you are writing now, the template uses Wiely's.

It's no wonder that when I usually look at the literature, I often find that different journals have different reference formats, layouts, and capitalization of title letters. Xu Qiu said.

Yes, but the format of periodicals from the same company is basically the same, Chen Wanqing said:

Because we basically only submit to the journals of those three companies, so it is enough to learn those three formats.

We generally use ENDNOTE software to sort out the literature, fill in the literature information, and then automatically generate references and export them in batches.

However, it should be noted that the format it generates sometimes has minor problems, which need to be changed manually.

Okay, I'll download one. Xu Qiu said.

By the way, I forgot to mention just now. The most important thing to submit an article is that you must not submit more than one manuscript. If you are found out, you will be directly blacklisted by the journal company, Chen Wanqing said:

However, the submissions are all handled by Mr. Wei, so we don't have to worry about this kind of thing.