What they don't tell you about academic publishing | 5 SECRETS

I think I've been lucky enough that when reviewer recommend citations those work were actually relevant and worth citing.

Your sweater is also a quilt

damn... that citation rigging bit was so shocking. scientists can be so petty and shady

I consider the bulk of academic publishers parasitic or predatory due to public money being funneled into private hands at significant profit AND LOBBYING to agencies responsible for science funding to use their bibliometrics, while not paying the authors or reviewers and exacerbating the reproducibility issues with expectations of novelty and positive results. Then they are also quite a bit archaic.

My supervisor was a huge proponent of the Vancouver protocol when determining authorship and guided me to use that as a source that I could refer others to as a way to safeguard against intimidation. Not a perfect system by any means but it was helpful to refer others to this system and ask “based on your contributions where do you envision yourself as an author?”

Mr, Andy when you Lecture/present please write for not hearing give dual service.

Academic Publishing, the industry that somehow can charge colleges thousands of dollars while paying authors and peer reviewers nothing. Nice racket.

thank you for this talk, do you have any lecture that reveal the main logic on how to get an article accepted

Interesting video. Thanks Andy

As someone who has worked in academic publishing for some years(back in the day), I would say to people submitting papers, please try and be patient. There are many processes that have to be fulfilled before a paper gets published. A typical well known journal will get hundreds of papers submitted every month. These have to be considered first by a junior editor, then passed to a managing editor. If deemed suitable then you have the process proof reader/copy editor /peer review. Finally if you're lucky, printers and then distributors. So please don't expect to see your paper in print the month after submission. If everything goes smoothly, then six months is pretty good. A heads up, if you ever think of getting a book published, then expect at least three years from submission to publication. Additionally you'll be doing well to get around 15% of the sale price of the book, unless you're already famous.

This is great. 😂

1 of your best vids 🎉

Thanks for all your videos. Super helpful!

Thanks for sharing this with us! No one wants to be in the "et al" , section of authors. I would like to talk about this on my channel, if you don't mind, for PAs who want to go into academia and research. I'll put a link to your channel.

I just can't comprehend how on-point you were in this video. I would like to point that even the country from which submit the paper is also necessary for the paper to be taken seriously by these journals. There is discrimination based on country as well as the most famous author you got on your list.
Incredible content. I am in the final months of my PhD, and I have experienced all these issues in these times. I may do a post-doc but just for a year and then I am going to transition into industry because I cannot handle the academic world...😄

Where I work, the school of medicine policy caps postdocs at 5 years of service. During the postdoc’s service there is a mentoring committee and program to support the scholar’s specific area of interest, to help the person apply for his or her own grants, and to promote submission to the right academic journals. Every PI has to be self-sustaining to receive promotion tenure, and frankly to stay employed. So getting used to this productivity schedule as a postdoctoral is a true representation of later career. Industry will always pay more, but what’s your motivation? Do you want to be the researcher responsible for finding a cure to a major disease?

MDPI cough cough cough

I'm not even in a field that does academic papers, but I still get emails from journals about every time a name similar to mine pops up in an article (they want me to subscribe).

Pro of being a historian: We write what we want because we don't care what others think.

Con of being a historian: We rarely get published anywhere because no one cares what we think.

You haven't talked much about education. Universities make most of their money from students.

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏👌👌👌👌👌👌👏👏👏👏👏👏🖖🖖🖖🖖🖖🖖

As for the order of authors: I believe this is field-dependent. In social sciences it is usually: 1st the PI, 2nd the person who actually wrote it, 3rd, 4th people who contributed smaller chunks. If there are more authors (rarely), they are put at the end, and they are often seen as courtesy authorship (people who could have been thanked but were put on the paper because they e.g. needed the publication for evaluation or something).

Could also address the citation “gangs” as groups of researchers who promise to cite each other’s papers ad nauseum in order to boost their H-index fast and shut out others not part of the gang.

Good that there are more and more journals that are free for both writers and readers :)
I think they get supported by the Universities and this is cheaper for the Universities than to subscribe to the closed journals.

All open source journals are predatory and that is a hill I will die on. "Reputable" peer review is already a dubious topic; I don't buy for one hot second that open source journals are accomplishing anything near a standard that is worth consuming.

This is a great video. Question: you mention the celebrity factor. However, isn’t the peer-review process meant to be blinded? Therefore, my assumption would be that what is actually accepted for publication has nothing to do with the author(s), but rather with the quality of the content. Is that incorrect?

Solution is to not subscribe to the journals that charge a fee. And, authors could up load their works into the Internet for others to see. Besides, employers don't really care about the journal that published your work. You just need to be able to perform on the job.

Nice Video, just got my paper rejected after a peer review. It was the first ever paper I ever submitted and I am at least happy that It didn't get desk rejection but a full peer review at least. It means that I just need to find the right journal and a bit of luck. you know what I mean😜

You forgot kissing the editor’s ass, ensuring you cite your own work excessively and tacking on every dipshit colleague who came within 10 miles of your office.

Forced citing of the reviewer is disguisting. I have not encountered it yet, but that is horrendous, connot wait for my first experience.

My major pet peeve has been how much time desk rejection can take. Waiting 2 months to get a desk rejection with 'out of scope' reasoning felt undefensable.

I am in private industry but help academics write papers when I can. I think if more people did this it would raise the quality of science since I am under zero pressure to publish.

So true about journals taking advantage of researchers (authors) and peer-reviewers. I did several peer reviews for a leading journal but got tired of donating all my free labor for their benefit. I am now assuring that I have enough peer-reviewing to substantiate my activity of the required :"service and scholarship" to maintain one's assistant professor status, but trying to focus on my "own" writing and publication which perpetually gets put on the back burner. They say that nothing kills one's publishing aspiration than a heavy teaching load. In nursing there are NEVER enough faculty to teach theory or clinicals.

Greetings to you sir!
Thank you for such a clear concept of authorship.
Meanwhile, I am in doubt how to decide the authorship of a group research paper. We were 7 person team to do all the field works of a carrot research in Nepal. But, when it came to data entry, analysis and manuscript preparation, nobody showed any concern or interest to proceed. Finally after 2 years of requesting, I decided to complete the work and I alone did all the data entry, analysis and manuscript preparation.
In this case, how should I decide the authorship appropriately?

"The PEER review system is the least worst body we have for governing... PEER reviewed publications." WTF? Apparently we credential folk way beyond their capacities.
BTW: This is from the top sentence of Your web page "Ph.D. Student Advice is hard to come by as there is (sic) a load of great reasons for doing a Ph.D." Again --WTF? Was grammatical accuracy optional in your Ph.D program?

Exactly, all academia is SELECTIVE. Each has their FAVORITES based on appearance, chemistry, extent to flattery, etc. who are ALWAYS given priority and most welcome in contrast to the ones who work hard and have brains to see and voice up the nasty affairs going behind the scenes.

Thank you so much. I am doing my Master's and about to write my 1st ever paper. I'm excited about the journey and look forward to contributing to the bodies of knowledge 😅💃🏾💃🏾💃🏾

This ia so helpful, in the right time.
I wonder how I know by document in general who is the main author. On my Faculty in Zagreb happened that lately my colleague was refused because in the rule writes in A category researxh should be the first author or main author. This is not detailed, I am gonna apply in August - September. It would be so helpful for me to provide with these informations, because I am third author in A and B category even that it was my own research. My mentor said it goes by hierarchy of position. I am demotivated to make another research as part of my thesis as reserve.

I have out of principle never accepted to add a list of irrelevant citations (all from the same group) to my manuscript because a reviewer asked for it. Instead, I contact the editor and point out the problem, basically asking whether they think the citations should be added. In every case, the editor thought it was a bad idea to add them. In one case, the editor entirely removed the reviewer in question from the manuscript for unethical behavior (meaning that I didn't had to write a response to that reviewer). In the remaining cases, I wrote a point-by-point response to the reviewer; where the request to cite a list of papers was made, I responded that "after discussion with the editor, we have decided to not add these citations". The reviewer now knows that the editor is on your side, not theirs, and that the best they can do is to just shut up and "accept the L".

this video contains a lot of half truth and misinformation. First every journal (including those with self said higher impact factor) will require people to pay for publishing under a variety of forms (not only the so called predatory one). Predatory journals are those published by other publishers than the large mainstream ones. That is to say large publishers have created the marketing story that if you do not publish in their products your research is not worth anything. Now anyone can explain to me why the same paper published by a large editor would be highly rated but the same published by a minor publisher (by definition predatory according to the large publishers who just lost the undeserved publishing fee) would be low impact? The high impact / low impact of a journal is just a rubbish marketing scheme. Finally peer review is never done for a large number of sectors (even though the journal editors claim it is) for the simple fact that is humanly impossible to redo the data collection, the experimental section, to rebuild the experimental tool/framework, etc. Good luck believing that if you pay to publish this will produce high quality research.

The academic peer-review journal system is censorship & corruption Andy. As is much of the rest of Academia, actually. I'm assuming you understand all this?

Nowadays, most of the "hq" journals are pushing the sciencetists to open access publishing. So isn't it predotary?

Thank you for explaining a mystery! Ive been wondering why research seems like an echo chamber.

When said and done, it all comes down to kudos, celebrity, renown, and yes, 'fame' - 'the last infirmity of the noble mind'. Academics are immune from none of the failings that afflict lesser mortals - that is, the uneducated - least of all the desire for recognition.

Nice Video :)

Strong disagreement with the middle author positions there in terms of "doing the least"
Senior authors who come last often do way less work, while middle authors can be the ones pulling the weight of the paper by performing the analyses or gathering the data.
It happens very often that someone like a phd student or postdoc are brought on board a project where the first author conceptually "designed" a study but then passes off the work onto the middle authors and there is a pre-defined senior author and prying that position from them is a whole fight in itself. 
Maybe that's a field-specific experience.
It's not right or what the authorship guidelines of most journals state but it still happens a lot.

Also, "corresponding author" is an increasingly sought-after position now, as weird as that may seem. Maybe that wasn't the case 2 years ago.

During my early-career phase, a major factor besides "is it a decent enough journal?" was literally "what's the average turn-around time?" because it matters so much. It's really silly but that's life.

Chasing after impact factor is not only unscientific in itself, but destructive. There is no predictive value in impact factor, and most academic papers are never read. NEVER. And that is also true for papers in high impact factor journals. 20% of papers account for 80% of citations, across the boards. Being in a high impact journal will not give you higher impact, you are not more likely to get read or cited.

On the other hand this chasing after impact factor leads journals (such as Nature) to manipulate their content. Impact facor is calculated by dividing citations by number of citable objects. A citable object does not include editorials, letters to the editor, commentary and so forth. Nature and other journals are likely to publish papers they assume will not get cited a lot as non citable objects rather than proper papers. Regardless of quality or the work you put into it, and publishers will happily publish anything in Nature, not realizing that their hard word gets published in a category that might not even count when their university evaluates their work.

However the citations FROM non citable objects count, so academic journals also often demand that you cite their content to be published in their journal, exactly for this reason. Pure manipulation, and a downward spiral.

Also; H-index is only a measure of age. It says nothing about quality of work, and it's basically a scam and a faulty metric. If anyone wants to measure you by h-index they're just irresponsible.


Bibliometricians are warning authorities, universities and academics to avoid the impact factor. It was a created as a way to allow libraries to spend less money, and has NO RELEVANCE WHATSOEVER in terms of quality of those papers. It's nonsense. I highly recommend taking a look at the Leiden Manifesto for Responsible Metrics, which elaborates on this.

Thank you 😊

Many head of nations/governments all over the world failed to realize this:
Many scientific works that change the world and humanity are deed and feat works not written and publication works.