Papers and journals

I'm an experimental scientist. I spend much time in the laboratory, but still I think I spend most of my time reading scientific papers. Scientific papers are texts written by scientists, for scientists. People not working in science would generally not understand anything of such a text, and it may even prove difficult for a scientist to understand a paper about a subject that she is not working with especifically. I mean, I'm a physisist, and I would of course not understand so much a scientific paper about lung cancer, but also papers about different areas of physics can be super-greek to me.

Being a scientist is revolving around these papers, and a scientist is generally evaluated on the basis on the papers she has written. Applying for a future job, she needs to refer to good papers in good journals with a lot of citations. In some countries you will get bonuses and raises as a scientist based on the papers you have written. Good papers and citations will also make it easier for you to establish new research projects and apply for official funding.

As a PhD candidate, the main objective is actually to write these papers. I need to write about 4-6 of them for my PhD degree to be approved. A paper can be anything from three to twenty pages. It sounds easy, but it's a real pain. For writing a paper of three pages I have to spend half a year in the laboratory pulling out my hair and another half in the office reading the thousands of pages other scientists have written before me about similar subjects.

Scientific journals are really not journals any more. I have not seen a journal since I started working on my PhD about a year ago. Well, many people have heard about Science and Nature, that are scientific journals that you might actually find on the shelf in the library. However, most researchers just use the on-line versions, which are databases of papers. If you know the author, the journal and the year a paper was published, you can find it.

But these journals are actually not so easy to get to. People outside universities that try to find a scientific paper, might find it, but would normally have to pay 50 dollars or so for downloading the document. If you are in a university you can download it for free, but the universities pay extremely large amounts of money to have this access. Who gets the money? Certainly not the actual scientists. I will not get any money publishing a paper, and I would actually have to pay for publishing it if I send a paper with color photographs.

And there is also the choice about the journal which you want to publish in. The journals are rated, they have what is called impact factor, which says something about how many people read the papers in this journal. Here is a list of impact factors for journals that are relevant for me:

• Nature: 34.5
• Science: 29.7
• Physical Review Letters: 7.8
• Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells: 3.9
• Applied Physics Letters: 3.6
• Physical Review B: 3.2
• Europhysics Letters: 2.9
• Journal of Alloys and Compounds: 2.1
• Journal of Applied Physics: 2.1

Well, highest is of course best and everybody wants to publish in Nature. But that's nearly impossible for a normal scientist as me. When you send a paper to a journal, the editor will take a look at it, and if it's not a total crap she will send it to a set of reviewers, which are experienced scientists within the same field. They will evaluate if it's a good enough paper for publishing, and then probably send you back some comments about things you should change or clarify. 

Scientific papers are normally written by 3-10 co-authors. That means in practice that one PhD student writes the paper, and another five people just want to put their names on the paper for their own convenience. Well, it's not so bad, having experienced scientists reading through your paper and keeping themselves informed can be to great help to a PhD student.

So, there is a lot of things to keep track of. I just submitted my first paper, I sent it to Journal of Alloys and Compounds, which as you see is on the bottom of the list of journals. I have to start somewhere!