Another Village: Mr. Li's SCI Paper Publication Process and Experience Summary

In the process of SCI submission guidance for many years, we often hear feedback from authors: they spend a lot of time in the submission process, search for a lot of materials on the Internet, and carefully select the target journal. However, after the article is submitted, either there is no news or you receive a rejection email from the journal very quickly, and the reason for the rejection is often as simple as "the paper is not novel enough". This situation left the authors at a loss to make changes, and ultimately the authors felt discouraged after repeated unsuccessful submissions, wasting time at the least, abandoning the submission, and missing out on valuable promotion opportunities.

Next, let's start from Mr. Li's submission experience and discuss how he overcame many difficulties step by step and finally successfully published SCI papers.

Mr. Li, who teaches at a medical university in southern China, hopes that his paper will be accepted by the journal within 10 months for promotion. The higher the journal impact factor, the better, so that it is more competitive.

最初，他将论文投到了Oxford Journals 旗下的 Clinical Infectious Diseases (IF 2020 9.079)，这是传染病领域的高档次期刊，仅次于 Lancet Infectious Diseases。 不过，在投稿后两周左右，他就被期刊直接拒稿，原因是论文的新颖性不足。

随后他又把论文投到 OxfordJournals 旗下的 Journal of Infectious Diseases (IF 2020 5.226)，其在传染病领域中仅次于 Clinical Inffectious Diseases。 在近三周后该期刊同样因论文新颖性不足拒稿。

In this case, Mr. Li sought the help of Yimaitong's paper assistant, hoping to give some suggestions to the paper and help him choose the target journal. After reading the paper, we found that there are many reasons for rejection, but the main focus is on two points:

1. There are major problems in essay writing, such as most of the sentences in the preface and discussion section are directly excerpts from your own published papers, that is, plagiarism.

2. The work done by the authors is only a routine epidemiological investigation of a certain common disease in the area, and there is no special innovation.

In view of this, it is not uncommon for a paper to be rejected by the above two journals. Later, we put forward some specific revisions to Prof. Li, suggesting that he revise the paper and submit it to Archives of Virology (IF 2020 2.574), and after about 70 days of review, we received the following reply from the editor.

Dear Dr.XXX,

Reviewer's comments on your work have now been received. You will see that he is advising against the publication of your work. Therefore, I must reject it.

Please note that in case the reviewer suggests a revision but rates a manuscript overall lower than 6-7 (present rejection rate 70%), we are also forced to reject the manuscript due to limited printing space.

For your guidance, I append the reviewer's comments below.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work.

Although the manuscript was still rejected in the end, the manuscript has entered the external review process, which indicates that the selection of the target journal is relatively accurate, and at least it has passed the preliminary review of the journal. It is worth mentioning that the editor-in-chief of the journal found only one reviewer within two months, so the decision on the manuscript can only be decided based on the opinion of this reviewer. Typically, the editor-in-chief will invite two or more experts to review the manuscript and make a final decision after synthesizing their opinions.

Mr. Li has encountered a rare situation, but the external reviewer's opinion of the rejected manuscript is often a stepping stone to be accepted by the next journal. With our help, Prof. Li humbly revised the paper again according to the specific suggestions given by the reviewers. The reviewer proposed: English language needs thorough revision. In this regard, Mr. Li found a paper assistant to help after many comparisons. Subsequently, the paper was submitted to another journal at the same level as the Archives of Virology, Virology Journal (IF 2020, 4.099) (its impact factor increased significantly in 2020). The paper quickly passed the initial screening of the journal, and after a month and a half of review, the journal gave a notice of minor revision. After 20 days of revision, the paper was sent back to the journal a few days after receiving an acceptance letter from the journal. At this time, there was still a month and a half left before the ten months that Mr. Li had hoped for, and he was finally promoted as he wished.

The successful publication of the paper is closely related to the selection of the target journal. The selection of the target journal first needs to correctly understand the quality of the paper, pay attention to verify whether the research content of the paper is consistent with the scope of the target journal, take the reviewer's comments seriously and revise and supplement, even if the manuscript is rejected, it is necessary to appropriately modify and select a new target journal according to the editor's opinion, and believe that the paper will eventually be published.

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