Some days ago I attended a lecture given by Mingfang Lu, Chief Representative of Institute of Physics Publishing. The title is ‘How to get published in IOP Journals’.
In the lecture he introduced the criteria of paper quality in IOP, the ‘Q’ levels:
Q1 Makes major contributions to the field
Q2 Good. Original and internationally competitive
Q3 Borderline work of limited interest
Q4 Add little or no new knowledge
Q5 Poor work
According to the statistics, among all the accepted papers from China last year, 7 (0.5%) of which are leveled as Q1, 36 (2.7%) as Q1.5, 986 (75.2%) as Q2, 226 (17.2%) as Q3, 56 (4.3%) as Q3.5, 1 (0.08%) as Q4 and 0 (0%) as Q5. I am not familiar of Chinese research in Physics, but it seems to me that we are doing not bad.
When it come to the acceptance/submission rate, however, China only got 27.8% last year while the global average was 50%, although submission number of China ranked No.2 from all other countries, following the US. This means Chinese researchers have submitted a good amount of rubbish to the IOP, and I suppose to other groups of journal also.
For example, what I’m doing now can only be regarded as Q3.5-Q4, adding no new knowledge to the field, having no interest, and poorly done. To minimize the negative effect of Chinese acc./sub. ratio, I won’t submit my work. When I start my PhD project I SWEAR it must be full of significant new results and originality, with sufficient discussion and suitable referencing, and, overall, make major contributions to the corresponding field, and boost my H-index considerably!!
Okay, so much about the quality. It hurts to talk about it…
And the lecture also gave some interesting information in paper preparation. In this age of Internet, Abstract and Fulltext are separated by charge, the former being free online. So there is a desire that the abstract be as fulltext-like as possible. So don’t write a brief abstract! Write you abstract as full as possible so that people that can’t see you full text can also cite your paper with enough reasons, and boost your H-index.
The lecture also introduced the process of peer viewing, ethical code, and other common topics in paper submission/publication.
