Research Your Options

Choosing the right direction for your research and preparing a strong manuscript starts well before writing. In this section, we offer tips to help you plan thoughtfully, position your work, and maximize the chances of success.

Define a Clear Research Question

  • Begin with a precise, well-focused question or hypothesis. A clear question guides your methods, analysis, and narrative.
  • Conduct a thorough literature review to identify gaps, contradictions, or emerging trends in your field. Your work should either fill a gap or offer a novel perspective.
  • Narrow the scope if needed: deep and rigorous work on a well-defined problem often outperforms a broad but shallow study.

Assess Feasibility & Resources

  • Before diving in, evaluate whether you have or can access the necessary infrastructure, equipment, data, funding, and collaborators.
  • Consider timelines, potential setbacks, and resource constraints.
  • If parts of the work are not feasible within your timeframe and means, it may be wiser to scale or adjust the project early on.

Choose the Right Target Journal / Audience

  • Identify from our journals whose scope, audience, and citation standards align with your field.
  • Study previously published works in those journals to see what kinds of questions, methods, structure, and writing style are accepted.
  • Use journal finder tools, impact metrics, indexing status, and editorial board profiles to evaluate suitability.
  • Balance prestige with practicality: sometimes a well-matched niche journal is better than forcing a fit in a top-tier journal.

Design Your Study Rigorously

  • Plan experiments or data collection with control groups, replicates, and sufficient statistical power.
  • Detail methodology clearly, define variables precisely, and identify potential confounders or biases in advance.
  • Register protocols or predefine your analysis plan if your field allows (to enhance transparency and reduce selective reporting).
  • Keep detailed logs, raw data, versioned code, and records of all decisions made during the project.

Pilot, Validate, & Refine

  • Where possible, run pilot experiments or small-scale tests to identify methodological issues before full rollout.
  • Validate your instruments, measurement methods, and data collection pipelines.
  • Inspect your data early for outliers, missing values, or anomalies and ask whether they reflect real signal or artifact.

Position Your Contribution

  • Before writing, think carefully about what’s new: is it a methodological advance, a novel dataset, a surprising finding, a new model, or integrative synthesis?
  • In your introduction, clearly articulate how your work adds to or shifts existing knowledge, don’t leave readers guessing.
  • Use citations strategically: reference foundational and recent work, show awareness of competing models or theories, and highlight differences.

Plan Your Manuscript Structure Early

  • Draft your outline (sections and subsections) before writing the full text. This helps maintain coherence and flow.
  • Decide which results, figures, and tables will go in the main body vs. supplementary materials.
  • Write “topic sentences” or mini-summaries for each section to keep your narrative focused.

Promotion & Visibility

  • Promotion of the Special Issue should begin alongside its launch, Guest Editors and the journal should coordinate communications (email, social media, homepage banners).
  • Guest Editors are encouraged to embed links in email signatures, post on social media, use graphical banners, and leverage their networks.
  • The journal should assist by providing promotional assets (images, formatted text) and cross-promoting on social channels.
  • Introducing the Special Issue at conferences or in talk slides can attract submissions. Flyers or poster versions can also be used.

Stay Informed of Field Trends & Review Tools

  • Regularly read journals, conference proceedings, and preprint servers to spot new directions or gaps that your work can address.
  • Track citation trends, thematic special issues, and funding calls to align your work with emerging interests.
  • Use literature mapping tools or reference managers to stay organized and discover related papers you may have missed.

Write with Clarity & Reader in Mind

  • Aim for simplicity and clarity: avoid unnecessary jargon, define terms at first use, and structure sentences thoughtfully.
  • Use active voice (“we measured…”) when possible; short sentences often communicate clearly.
  • Make your figures and tables intuitive, self-contained, and directly relevant to your narrative.

Consider Preprints, Registered Reports & Open Practices

  • Depending on your field, depositing a preprint can establish early visibility, allow feedback, and avoid priority disputes.
  • Explore registered report options if your journal or discipline supports them—to lock in methodology before observing results.
  • Embrace open science: share data, code, and protocols openly (subject to privacy and ethics) to build trust and reuse.

Decide Where to Position Core vs. Extra Material

  • As you plan your manuscript, decide early which results, methods, or data will go in the main paper vs supplementary material.
  • Make sure anything essential to understand the main findings remains within the main article (not hidden in SI).
  • Use supplementary files strategically for additional detail: extended methods, raw data tables, additional figures, protocols, etc.

Stay Flexible & Honest

  • Sometimes your first choice journal may be rejected based on scope, even if your work is strong. That doesn’t reflect your research quality, rethink fit, not value.
  • Avoid chasing prestige alone, a well-matched, reputable journal is often a better home than an out-of-range target.
  • Be ready to adapt: revise the framing, adjust your introduction, or target a different audience if needed.