 Hello, everybody. Welcome to the stream this week. It's Monica Wahee and we're at our weekly data science live stream. Of course, I'm going to sneeze right now. My nose is tickling me. Excuse me. It's Boston, you know, it's the pollen. Well, thank you for showing up again. Those of you who are coming back, actually, let me put on the chat overlay. And thanks to you who are coming for the first time. Those of you who've been to data science chat before know the ongoing soap opera is I'm not seeing people in the chat. What's happening is people who are joining from LinkedIn are chatting and that and I'm not seeing it in the chat. It's supposed to display. You can see where it says, you know, there's a space where it's supposed to be in the chat overlay. And the only questions I'm seeing are coming in from the YouTube version of this because I'm streaming to both. So if you're on LinkedIn and you like being on LinkedIn, you know, it's no problem. You can say things, but I won't see your comments until after the stream. I'll go back and look at them. I'll try to, you know, like answer them then. But if you want me to, if you want to actually chat, you're going to have to go in through the YouTube and then I'll be able to see it. We'll all be able to see you. All right. And I'll try to sort of say that maybe halfway through the stream remind everybody the the software I'm using to stream is called restream. And there's a lot of good things about restream. I really like using it. But this is kind of buggy right now, this whole chat thing, because it's integration. And other people who use this application are like, you know, working with them to try to evolve it to get it better. So I apologize for that. So as those are your joining. So if if you want to actually chat or try to chat, go ahead and say hi. And, you know, tell me where you're from. And you'll know that today's topic is like I'll read the actual topic three tips for publishing and peer review journals. So I expect those of you who are watching this are coming here today are concerned about that like you want to publish in peer review journals. And you're maybe at various levels of sophistication, like I work with a lot of people who actually have published in peer review journals multiple times. And they still feel like they kind of don't know what they're doing, because it's really hard. It's a really complicated ecosystem, the scientific publishing. So that's one of the things that I do. I'm an expert at is that whole ecosystem. But I can't explain that in an hour. So I just picked out three tips that are sort of generic things that I find that when I'm working with customers, even sophisticated ones, I'll give them these tips. And they're like Monica, I had no idea, you know, so these are sort of like insider tips, you know, that you get to know after you've been publishing a lot in the scientific literature and had a lot of different experiences. That's the thing is, whenever I'm working with a customer, and we're submitting a paper to a scientific journal, I'm famous for saying that every single time you do that is a completely unique experience. There's always some new thing that I like never saw before. It never it's never every single thing we do is something I've done before. There's always some weird nuance. And there probably shouldn't be like there's a bigger discussion about whether this is good or not, whether the situation is a good situation. I'm leaving that aside in this presentation and just saying how do you get through the situation? All right, so after I'm going to show you some slides. And feel free to go and ask a question. I'll just have to look back and forth from the slides. And those of you who are watching this or want to get the slides, what I do is on YouTube after this is done, I go back and I update the description on YouTube with timestamps. And I'll put the link to the slide so you can download them and links to other things that I bring up. All right, so let's go and start our presentation now. I don't see any questions. Let's see here. So here we go. So this is like I said, my topic for today, which is three tips for publishing in peer review journals. Okay, good. Okay, so let's go to the next slide. So what am I going to talk about? First, I'm going to just give you a little background to make sure we're all on the same page about what I'm talking about, which is what exactly is a peer review journal compared to other anything else that's written in science or academia? Like how do we know exactly that it's a peer review journal? And actually that leads that that issue of like how do you know leads to a few challenges I wanted to highlight because the tips that I'm going to give you in this are directly related to those particular challenges. Now there's like 100 million challenges. But I just wanted to give you something like that you could take away from this and go okay, I'm now a little more smarter and empowered about this really complicated kind of, you know, difficult situation, which is scientific publishing in the peer review journal. So I always I said three tips to make your journey from manuscript to publication easier and it is kind of a journey. As an aside, you know, it depends on whether you're just authoring it alone or you have a group and usually there's a group. And when there's a group, you know, it's a real journey because you're dragging these people along. So so that's part of why I picked these three tips to give is they're tips that help you work with even a group of authors, whether you're like kind of a student status where you're doing research as a student, and then you're going to try and publish it and then you have your faculty as authors, or you're just a professor or academic like me and you just have your peers in your group. All right, so that's what I'm going to talk about. Let me go and see if there's any questions or any highs. Nope, not yet. All right. Okay, I said the first thing I was going to do is define what I was talking about with this peer review journal. So how do you know if a journal is peer reviewed? Well, the snotty answer is it uses the peer review method. Okay. But without being snotty, that's literally how you know is it uses a method of peer review. Now, that's where there's a little devil in the details. But what what exactly is peer review? Well, I want you to really imagine how a journal works. I'm really going to just drop try to create an image in your mind like a guided meditation. This one's stressful. Okay, I'm going to give you stress. But anyway, so I want you to imagine this journal as a business that's not there to make a lot of money. Most journals are not there to make money. They're either nonprofits if they're in the US, or they're sometimes societies like the American Journal of Public Health is there from the American Public Health Association. So that association has this journal and the journal, I think they're both nonprofit, they might even be part of the same thing. And so this nonprofit business, okay, so it's not trying to make a profit, it's just trying to run. What does it actually do? Well, what it does that the people who actually are hired to work at the journal, there's not a lot of scientists hired to work there. Not a lot of people like that. There are people hired to work there, but they're more like business people like managers, and and office people. And their goal is to actually facilitate, see that that diagram on the slide, to facilitate a process like that happening. Who are the peers in the peer review? They're not the people who work at the journal. They're all of us out there in the world. Like if you're if you're listening to this and you're going, Oh, I want to submit for the peer review journals, I want to publish in there. You're a peer, and I'm a peer. And so we don't work for the journal. So how do we review stuff for the journal? So that's what happens is, let's say me and my customers get together when we write a paper. Okay, well, who am I? I'm this consultant, this epidemiologist. And where are my customers? They're professors and other epidemiologists, people at the government all over the world. You know, we all get together and we're like, we have to write this paper, you know? So and we do and they're working somewhere else and and who's paying them to write the paper? Sometimes no one, you know, people pay me to write papers for them. You know, so that's my business. But if you work at like, I have a friend who works, she's like the director of a nursing program, she has a right papers like sort of as part of her job, you know? And so, so it's like part of her salary that she's getting there, she's expected to write these papers. So it's like, how do you, you know, the journal's not paying her, the journal's not paying me, you know, like, if I help her write a paper, like I do statistical analysis for her, she'll pay me for that work. But the journal is going to get it, right? So how does, how is this, you know? So what happens is my, I get my group together and we prepare a journal article, we decide what journal to send it to. And then usually the journals are set up so that you go online to a journal and you'll see it has like about and then instructions for authors. And if you go to the instructions for authors, they'll say, Hey, you want to submit to our journal, go ahead, set up an account on our journal portal and go log in and fill it out and some hit submit and we'll get it. Okay. So I go do that. And then when I hit submit, guess who gets it? Right? Those people at that at the journal, the actual business managers, office people, every day they go in and they check that portal. That portal sort of runs how the journal's business is now. Think of it like a course management system, the way you do that, if you're going to school or college, the way the course management system sort of manages that business of teaching. Well, these journal portals manage the business of going back and forth and doing peer review, right? So what happens is I hit submit. So when I hit submit, I've already made an account on there. And when I made an account, I told them, I checked off things that said I'm good at biostatistics. I know informatics, I know data science, I'm an epidemiologist. And let's say that we're submitting to an oral health journal, like a dentistry journal. I don't know much about dentistry. I know about epidemiology of oral health. So I'll check those things off. When I do that, I go into their database. And later, if that journal has some oral health epidemiology paper submitted from someone else, and they need somebody to review it up here, they're probably going to go find me because they have my account information. In fact, they'll literally log into that portal, find my record, and just email me from the portal and say, Hey, we got the submission. Do you want to review it? So when I'm the author, I log in and I hit submit. But when I'm the reviewer, I log in on the same account. And there's a tab that says author and a tab that says reviewer. And I go over the review tab and I go, Oh, here's my papers for review. Right. So who am I? I'm just this freelance epidemiologist in Boston. You know, my group could submit a paper, let's say it's on oral epidemiology. And to some dentistry journal, they've got a database, they're going to go and query like people in the database to do the peer review, right. So if you think of all the dental schools all over the world, maybe somebody they're going to get, you know, an email from that portal that says, Hey, you want to review this, right? So how many people do they send it to? It depends on the journal. How long do they give them to review it? And those peer reviewers have to log in and click, click, click, enter their review. And they give you feedback and stuff. And you know, that takes a long time. And then you get it. And some of the journals are they'll they'll make it so it's anonymous, like you don't know who's reviewing you. Some of them don't. There's again, just about every point I'm making, there's a whole like debate about out there that we could get into. But in any case, what what happens is like, you know, it goes out for the reviews, however many reviewers complete a review, submit them. It goes back to the authors. So like when I've got this author team, I collect these two or three reviews. And my, my group always starts crying and wailing. And I always calm them down. And I say, it's no problem. And we got to review, just make these changes. And we'll submit it again. They'll like it, right? So I have to go through and make a letter where I list all the changes asked. And you know, sometimes more than one reviewer asks for the same changes, you know, I try to prevent there from being a weak spot in the papers. But you know, everybody's just different. And they see different things. In any case, we just write this letter. And we explain how we fixed everything. And we actually do fix everything. I log back in the portal, submit everything. And usually by then, everything is fixed. The reviewers look at it again, they're like, yeah, that's fine. And, and then the journal goes on to publish it, right? So this image on the slide is a diagram of that, how that process works at a particular publisher of journals. Wiley, you see that on the slide is a publisher of many scientific journals. And if you submit to any of those journals, and you follow this decision tree, this is what's going to happen to you. Okay. So this is a long way of saying, there may be different ways. This is Wiley's way, you know, there may be different ways they find the peer review different amounts of time, whatever. But in general, if the journal is doing this really hard work of going out there and finding peers to review this and then getting these comments back and getting everybody to do that, if they're doing all that, then they're a peer review journal. So now that I just explained that to you, you're like, oh my gosh, that is so much work. And, you know, so it's like even how do the journals make money, right? Well, libraries have to carry the journals, you know, like Harvard Library or University of Minnesota Library. So they, that's how they make their money. But you see that they're really operating in a very cheap way, you know, and basically just facilitating all this peer review. And then somebody like me, I like to publish a lot. So what's fair is I review a lot and go ahead and ask anybody I review all the time. And one of the things, the reasons why I'm doing this live stream is a lot of my customers are asking me to teach them how to do peer reviews, like they don't know, because they don't teach you in school. Isn't that funny? But anyway, so if you were thinking of submitting to a journal and you're like, I'm not sure this is a peer review journal, go on the website, go look for instructions to authors, go look for the about and see if it says something about peer review, because if it's going to do this big, hard thing, it's peer review journal. Okay, so let me just go and see if there's any questions. Nope, no questions. Or I can't see any questions. So if you want, if you have any questions, you got to comment on YouTube and ask questions. All right. So what this brings us to our first common challenge. And that is predatory journals. And these are journals that are not operating in good faith. They're not trying to be a journal. They're trying to scam and make money. And if you as as you've already probably noticed that the journal business doesn't lend itself to scamming and making a lot of money. But they found a business model called the predatory journals that like a predatory is like, you know, like a, like of a lion goes and attacks a deer, the lines of predator, right? Well, these journals are get created, you know, like the other journals get created, like the American Journal of Public Health, because the society wants, you know, to disseminate scientific knowledge, which is what you're supposed to do, right? Like maybe, like there's certain universities, I can't remember any off the top of my head, or colleges that will have their own peer review journal. It's kind of cool. You know, I'm not familiar with one at the University of Minnesota, but I know that they have them. Like I've seen one in Texas or wherever. And they're they're small. They're they're like low budget, but they're operating good faith. They're trying to get research out peer reviewed research. What predatory journals do is they don't care about that. They just want to make money. And so in reality, whenever you submit to a peer review journal, and you legitimate one, and you need to publish, you might find that they charge a fee of a few thousand dollars. And that fee is going to be a little bit more if they publish open access, meaning that you can go and download the PDF on the web afterwards. All of my customers complain about this fee. But I tell them, please don't complain, please just pay it, your budget for it in grants, let's just pay it. Because first of all, the journals are not really made, the legitimate journals are not really making very much money. And also, if you publish something open access, and people can download that PDF, they're going to reference it. So and you just people are going to read your stuff if you have it out there. So when you go to legitimate journal and you're paying those fees, what are you paying for? You're paying for them to make it all nice, make the PDF be on the web be not having any typographical errors, make sure that real peers are peer reviewing, like I really am an epidemiologist, you know, like they're not sending me something that I can't review, you know what I mean, like they're really doing, that's what that fee goes to is to make that so they can really do what they're saying. In a predatory journal, what they'll do is they'll say they're a journal, they'll say everybody submit to us, we're a journal, they'll send emails, guess what? We're having an addition on diabetes, send us your papers, whatever. Then when they get the papers, their ideas, they're going to try and accept them all so they can just charge these people money. But how do they go through that and create a veneer, a patina of peer review? Well, they, they kind of get other people involved on a volunteer basis. And I'll tell you the story of one of my customers. So I feel like a, a mom with a bunch of toddlers by a street. And I'm trying to keep these toddlers out of the street. Okay, that's the way I feel about my customers and predatory journals. Okay, because they always want to go over there and submit to a predatory journal. I'm like, get out of the street. No. And they're like, but Monica, they're they'll review it right away. And I'm like, but it's a scam. It's a lie. And a lot of times they don't really understand. Well, one of my customers got ran over in the street, she she joined the editorial board of a predatory journal without realizing. Then when they started asking her to do stuff, she didn't know how. So she's like, Monica, what's going on? And that's when I was like, you know, so I said to her first, said to her resign now. So I wrote a resignation letter for her to submit. And she's like, no, no, no, Monica, I just want to, I just want the experience I want to try. I want to try to be an editor here. And I didn't I thought it was a dangerous thing. But I worked with her. I mean, it was her choice. And I learned why it's bad to do that. First of all, she couldn't tell what was going on because they didn't really have that many people hired there. Obviously there's scam. So she'd ask questions about like, like they wanted her to go find peer reviewers. And she's like, from where do you guys are supposed to have a database? And there were people just like not answering questions from the predatory journal. Then she was given these articles to review that were not good at all. Like they didn't even what normally happens in a normal journal is let's say somebody submits an article in English, but the English is so bad, you just cannot even understand it. The editors just briefly look at everything and they'll say, no, we can't review this, we can't even understand it. Or let's say that I like recently this happened. We have a paper my colleague and I on an oral health topic and we submitted it to a certain journal. And that journal said that they don't they aren't interested in that topic. But they have a sister journal, like another journal published by the same publisher, that would be interested in the topic, right? So you you might, you know, submit to a journal. Every time you submit to a journal, the editor, some one of the editors at least looks at it. And remember, the editors are also academics, they're like peers, they're, they're just people working at colleges. And so these journal staff will, you know, get the stuff off the portal and show it to the editors. They're like, no, this isn't right for us. They'll just say, no, thank you. Well, in a predatory journal, they'll just accept everything. And they'll just be like, okay, and you can't even read it. And so here I was trying to help my customer review it. She's like, Monica, I want to learn how to review stuff. Like, you can't review stuff that's just garbage. So I was telling her, I'm just like telling her to write back to them, we're not going to peer review these things. There's no way to make it better. Right. And so I started realizing the risk to these people during COVID-19. There was a predatory paper published about vaccines that was wrong and got a lot of press. It had to be redacted. They and people said, well, how did it get so wrong? Well, you know, the paper was bad. The people reviewing it were not experts in whatever the paper was in. I mean, it was just a complete breakdown of the journal system. And so what I always do, like my customers are always sending me emails, forwarding me emails from these predatory journals to say submit here, submit there. And I always send them to this webpage I have on there called, on the slide called Bell's List. And I put a link there. This is a list of the, it's called the gray literature. Like one of the publishers is called MDPI. I consider MDPI a predatory publisher. Like I don't like them. And I won't reference stuff from them. MDPI is argues that they have a peer review infrastructure, that they're really a peer review journal. So they're going to be mad that I sent this. And they're mad that Bell's always brings them up. Okay. But I tend to like, there are certain publishers, I consider predatory and Bell considers predatory that are trying to push back saying, no, no, we have this peer review process. But I have a feeling it's a lot like exactly what my customer experience, which is not, not acceptable. So I just feel like it's really important to teach people information literacy in science about these predatory journals. And so that's what I'm doing right now. So this is a real challenge in my field. Okay. Let me go look and see if there's any questions here. Nope. No questions. All right. Here's the second common challenge. Okay, well, let's say that you get a legitimate publisher like Wiley. And you just decide that you're going to publish. You got a good group, you write a good paper, you're going to go publish. What happens is the process becomes very confusing because you have to just do one thing at a time. Remember how I said you can submit to a journal, like we submitted to that oral health journal, and they were like, this isn't exactly on the topic we publish on, but we could give it to our sister journal. Okay. Well, the sister journal might have different standards, and they have different portal. So I have to make a new folder for that. Like the first one we did everything submitted. Then I get the notices and then I make it like a new folder and I'm like, okay, here's the second one. Let's say that instead they did review it and they give us feedback. Then I'm going to have to keep track of the fact that I went into the portal, got the feedback, and then we're making a new letter explaining what we did and we're submitting it. Sometimes you have to go to multiple journals. Sometimes they just say we don't want to review it by start over. So you end up with having a lot of folders and a lot of information and a lot of different versions, which are all sort of like the end version. They're just formatted differently to comply with the instructions. So you get, things get very confusing as you go along and you have to be very careful, especially if you're in a group of people that you don't lose like figures or you don't have an outdated table or anything like that. Then the third challenge is, as you can see by this flow chart, even if you go really fast, it takes a long time. So let's say it's January and you submit a paper and stars are lucky for you. They decide to review it at the journal. They send it to three peer reviewers and they take about a month to peer review it and they submit their review and you take maybe just a few days to revise it and then the journal sends it back to the reviewers. They say, okay, yeah, oh yeah, it looks good. You did a good job. You know, now we're into March and then by April, maybe it's accepted. But when is the journal actually going to put it up in the journal site, right? This is like fast. Like if you can go from manuscript to publication in six months, that's fast. So that's not very fast. There are a lot of challenges in trying to shorten that time. That's what I always do is I've tried to come up with tricks. I have like literally 500 of them. I'm giving you three in this. But my tips and tricks are all about shortening that time because you can't make the stuff go away. There's got to be peers. There's got to be the journal portal. You just got to do all that. But how do you like suck a little air out of the time? Like make the timeline, you know, just pull little inches out of the timeline and make it just a little faster, right? One of them is to just pick the right journal in the first place, which is hard. But that's, I'm good at that. So that's what you pay a big bucks for me to do for you. If you pick a journal that's going to like it, they review it right away. And if the journal reviews it and they almost always want you to do some fixes. But if it's really well written and you choose the right journal, the fixes are minor. So as soon as you get it back, you can just fix it and turn it around. So the less back and forth, the faster the process goes. So all my tips are sort of designed towards reducing the amount of back and forth between the reviewers in the journal and you in the journal, your authors in the journal. Let me see if I got any questions. No. All right. So now the three tips I came up with for you today are aimed at these challenges, okay? If you employ these tips, they can help ensure you are aiming your manuscript at reputable journals, okay, and not predatory ones. It can help you prevent confusion as you try to get your paper published. Even a good paper can take a few submissions. And the goal is to just shorten the process overall so it doesn't take as long. But here's the first tip. Know your publishers. So I was telling you about predatory publishers like in the gray and the black public publishing like area. These are the quote-unquote white publishers like the ones that we know and they have a good reputation. I put Wiley on the slide. We know Elsevier, we know BMC, we know Springer Nature, Lippincott, Taylor and Francis online. I'm sure those of you who are watching and are listening to me, they're like, you're like, oh, I recognize all that. Oh, yeah, I recognize that tree from Elsevier. Well, yeah, we recognize it because we see it all the time, but did you ever really look and study these businesses, these publishers? It's really important to do so. I put a link on the slide. One of these, the Sacramento State is a college and they put a library guide which just has a list with all the links. Just go read about these organizations because they actually have a lot of power over what we end up seeing in the scientific literature. Like I said, everything I bring up, there's a huge debate about it. Like a lot of people are mad at Elsevier and also these other ones because let's say that I, I publish, you know, I'm one of the authors and I publish something. I have to pay a fee, but after it's published, if it's not open access and I don't subscribe to the journal and I don't work in some place that has it in their library, I have to pay for my own article. I have to buy my own article from Elsevier if that were to happen, if that circumstance occurred. So that circumstance is getting less and less common because there's more and more open access publishing, but philosophically there's something wrong with that. So people are kind of mad about that because we're the authors and we just seem to have no power in this. But still it's important then publishers are different. They have different journals and they have different rules. So it's worth it to just study these publishers. Look, I was talking about oral health, let's say you're in sociology, or let's say you're in like health disparities or you're in like, you know, endocrine cancer, like I'm just picking any of these fields. Whatever field you're in, you're going to know the publishers that you see a lot of stuff from. And like I put these on the slide, if you're watching this and you're like, well I don't actually recognize some of those. Well you're probably in topics that I'm not in and you have different. Like for instance, I have one of my customers, she's a business professor and she publishes in business and she's really intelligent. So whenever it's time to publish, she tells me what journal we're going to go to and stuff because she, the business publisher journals are, they're not these. Okay. And so, but she knows what she's doing, you know, she's an academic and she studies those. And so I'm saying study these, you know, at least start by studying where your literature is in your field. And what you can do is go to the journals in each of the publishers, like go to LCVIA journals, go to BMC journals. And you'll notice the journals on different topics, but they sort of have the same style, you know, because they're, you know, published by the same publishing house. So they have, tend to have similar instructions for their instructions of authors. And one of the things I coach people on is, if you already are a writer, you're a student, maybe you're writing papers, look at where are the journals coming, what journals are the references you're taking coming from. Like if you're referencing scientific articles, what journals are they published in and what publishers are they attached to. So this is a big picture way of saying get to know your field from the point of view of what journals are hot, not just what journals, but what publishers they're connected to. And if there's just a few publishers that are big in your field, you really get to know those publishers. And so just being empowered with knowledge of what I just described can make it so that you make choices when you're doing your peer review publication that shortens the time. Like you maybe might pick a particular publisher or journal because you groove with them somehow. You know, like you guys get along really well for some reason. I'm kind of, it sounds silly, but this colleague I'm talking about who's a business colleague, she has certain journals that we groove with. Like we they love our stuff and we just do well with them, so we just keep going back. Sometimes you can get into a relationship like that. You know, because each journal has its own audience. And so again, you just have to empower yourself with the knowledge. Okay, so that's tip number one. I'm gonna check for questions. No questions. Okay, so here's tip number two. And it's totally, like tip number one is pretty big picture philosophical. Tip number two is really practical. And that is keep a notes page on all of your submissions. So you'll see these screenshots on the slide. The green one with the green outline says notes about journal of public health dentistry. Next one says notes about American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Next one says notes about health affairs. You'll see that health affairs one. There's a bunch of links to the website. There's a bunch of notes about how long the research article can be. So what is these are just word documents. I just make a word document for each journal we submit to and I write any notes I need as and you get good at you kind of know what you need to remember. So I I'll tell you I've been teaching this to all my customers. No one will do it. Absolutely. People resist this like crazy. I don't know why they won't do it. And how I know is I'll teach it and then I'll get a customer coming back to me after you know a year and maybe I haven't talked to them. They'll say help me out. I submitted a journal. They want a journal article. They want revisions and I'm having trouble making the revisions and I'm like okay no problem. I can help you. But then when I go for the original submission try to figure out what happened. They don't remember. I'm like where's the link to this. What's your account name and password. But you know when did you submit it. How long has you know who are the co-authors. How do we get a hold of them. Did you get a you know they all this is lost. They don't remember. I'm like why did you pick this topic. Why did you and so I end up having to make the notes page like you can't get out of it. I can't get out of it. I end up trying to make the notes page after the fact. And I'm like why didn't you just do what I said. I don't know why they don't do what I say. But I'm trying to tell you to do what I say. I don't know. Maybe maybe you have to not do it and regret it before you start doing it. And it's probably how I got started. But in any way how you do it is each time you submit a draft. Either it's the first time you're submitting it to that journal. Or you're revising it because the journal said oh we like it but shape do these changes the peer reviews it. If it's the first time you're submitting to the journal like make a notes page and explain everything about how to log into that portal how you formatted things because they all want different formatting. And then on that notes page keep track of each time there's back and forth between the journal and you like sometimes the peer reviewers will review and give you a bunch of feedback you'll do a bunch of changes you'll give it back to them and their changes will spark that they want other things changed. I don't mind that if that happens and we're getting towards an outcome because when I review I I've been in a lot of situations where the people submit a pretty good paper but they're they do the statistics wrong they just do them wrong like they collected the data but they did the statistics wrong and so I don't know the answer the research question. And I'm very teacher Lee I just explained to them how to do the statistics right and in my feedback and I'm like please do that and the next time we'll know what happened we'll know about your research chain because if you don't do it right you don't know the answer so then they'll give it back to me and they'll do it right because I give good instructions and they're usually really happy because now it's obvious what the answer the research question is if you don't do the data right like you're just like I don't know you know and then they've become happy about that and their discussion is so much better everything is better about it but sometimes there's just like there's new information they answered the research question so maybe there's some debate in there and then I have to send it back once more so to prevent that just do a really good job writing the first draft like just make sure that your you know statistics matches your research aim you answered you know just do a really good job the first draft and then it won't have to come back and forth twice right well that's easier said than done but that's why you hire me because I'm really good at that first draft but when you submit that first draft to that journal it's you keep a notes page with all this information and each time they come back and ask you to revise that you put notes on that page but remember each time you revise a draft according to the what the peers said you not only give submit a new draft on that journal portal but you also submit a letter that's a separate letter that listed all the changes like for example you know how I was saying I'll tell them you need to change your statistics don't do them like you're doing do them like this and I often like link them to a an actual article that does them that way and I say okay and you know use this variable for this use that variable for that and make a table like their table three or whatever you know and I'll have all these instructions right and then in their letter back they'll sort of copy those instructions say okay we tried to do everything she said but we ran out of data on the sun or whatever you know and they'll just sort of explain how they tried to do it it's kind of like you're the teacher and you say try to do this and the student says okay well we did our best and this is how it came out so because you have to do that letter each time you yourself as the author when you're the author you remember what you changes you made and why because you you have to write that letter and so that letter exists okay so you don't have to worry about that you just have to go back to this notes page and update and keep track of the fact that you had another round so you always have those letters that never goes away it's this notes page that sort of ties together all the transactions on this and curates all that that's super helpful and it's not only is it super helpful if you have it it's horrible if you don't like I will make one to solve your problem because I won't be able to solve your problem this is like step zero solving problem if you have one all right let me go see if anybody has any questions yet oh hi CJ is here so everybody um CJ is a local Boston based musician and um he's probably got to go right away because he goes plays gigs uh pretty much every day um he's usually at the Heinz convention center subway stop um if you're in Boston go catch him he's usually 130 to 330 he's got music that's what I use in my videos so thank you CJ he's also got um paintings that he does they're gorgeous and um you can find him he's CJ Hutch on Instagram and um on Spotify no I think he's CJ Hutchings on Instagram well he's on YouTube if you're on YouTube you can find him but anyway thanks for showing up CJ I really appreciate it I go to his concerts a lot um so I said you got to show up for my live stream so that's awesome and and thanks again for the music the unfortunate thing about CJ is my videos with his music on him everybody says the video they don't like the video they just like the music totally annoying anyway thank you all right so um I'm going to go back to my slide presentation I see there's no real questions so I'm going to give you the final tip which is tip number three and that is have a pretend reviewer what do I mean by that well remember how I said you create a journal portal article portal uh or you create a count on the journal article portal and you go you get everything ready one of you has to be the corresponding author you know and usually me because I'm good at correspondence but anyway so like if I also teach people how to be the corresponding author like sometimes my customers are like Monica I'm tired of you controlling it can I be the corresponding author I'm like sure so when you're the corresponding author you're the person in charge of getting this portal ready and submitting it what a good thing to do remember how I said if you write a really good draft the first time it reduces the back and forth and reduces the time to publication well how do you write a really good draft the first time well here's a trick like if you're not me and you you aren't just good at it and you you're starting out and you're like I can't afford Monica here's what you do find a colleague who you think is a good writer who's your friend who's just supportive or or a professor like somebody who's supportive of you and after your team puts together your manuscript ask that person if they will be act like they were doing a peer review like they get it like a real peer reviewer as if they got it on the portal and and they it was anonymous and they didn't know it was you guys right and um then they would write an actual review because when you write a review you know like I'll like I was giving you an example of the kind of review I often write where I'll be like oh this background is really good that research question is great I totally agree with the the methods yeah they're they're clear I can kind of see your data collection and see where you're going but you did the statistics wrong so I don't really understand the results right like that's the kind of things that I'll be saying in there um and so imagine you were you had me pre-review it did the pretend reviewer and gave it to you and I had all these changes and stuff if I have them probably other people would notice it that's one of the things I've noticed is there's if you think there's something wrong with your paper there everybody probably thinks there's something wrong with your paper like if anybody thinks there's something wrong it probably is wrong or it's probably something you should get ahead of right like if they're saying oh should you really use the statistic then I'm like well we probably should write a whole paragraph about why we picked that statistic right just to make just to head them off of any questions um but anyway so if you get a pretend reviewer somebody to write you an actual review and then you actually go through and do all the feedback what's different is you don't have to write a letter back to them and say what you did you just it's just private it's like they write a review give it to you and say you can do with it what you want you good luck and by the way I do this with grants too I would recommend if you get your grant done before the deadline to have somebody act pretend be pretend grant reviewer and actually write it give it to you and then have you fix the grant you know so that's that's uh this step the goal is a step to catch obvious issues and prevent some back and forth and I'll tell you it can be hard to find the right person who owes you and is also a good reviewer but it's way better if if you're unsure if you're at the beginning of your career and your your writing career and you're unsure this is a really good idea and you can form like like payers you know um and it's okay if the person is not exactly in your field in fact it's sometimes better because they're it's easier for them to catch if something is confusing like you didn't even explain where these you know how you sample these participants or something like that all right let me see if there's any questions here okay we got a question here thanks for showing up Bruce Lee um Bruce Lee says how do you apply to be a peer reviewer right and so in other words what Bruce Lee is is hoping to be is she's wanting someday to receive that email from um a journal that says would you like to review this article well the way that that normally happens is the ways that they would know about her is that if she had already submitted a different paper on that um journal portal right because when she signed up for her account to be of course responding author they'd say oh it's nice to meet you here's a list of of topics check off the ones you're good at right and like I was saying earlier in the this when I get that I check off public health and statistics and data science and stuff right but if you're an infectious disease person you're checking off different things right and so what I would recommend specifically for you Bruce Lee is remember my first tip which is get to know different um uh publishers I would take that step farther and get to know different journals and if you see a journal and you're like I know about that I could actually review a paper from that just create an account as if you were going to submit a paper and then don't submit one because then you'll be in their database with your classifications and they might find you and this is not a bad idea for actually people who are students like in your phd if you want to practice reviewing you want to see if you can get reviews you know sent to you just sign up on these journal portals and don't submit a paper and you should be able they should start finding you now you know if you work at a journal and you're like okay I got to find somebody to read this paper and all you find in your databases some grad students never publish anything um it might not be the first person you pick to review that however if you're talking about like factor seven and that which is a blood factor and that's what the topic is about and the um the paper is about and this grad students an expert at factor seven maybe that they'll be chosen so it's that's where I would start but actually as soon as you start being an author as soon as you start publishing you'll end up automatically being swooped up into that ecosystem and you'll start getting emails as a peer reviewer as a side note since we're on this topic I tell all my customers that even though they work a lot of my customers are tenured professors at like you know really reputable colleges but also use your gmail account on when you sign up for these places you know for your email account like use gmail or yahoo or hotmail or whatever um because it's you it's usually easier to make sure you can always log into your gmail account like if you work at like one of my customers she has a dual appointment at two different colleges and one of them got confused and cut off her email they they didn't realize she was still appointed there and it was so much trouble to get it reinstated well if she had used that email for one of the journal communication things we would have missed all those emails there so it's good to use your gmail for all of these even if you you know work some cool place all right so um now i'm going to just go to our start wrapping up the live stream so just for review today's tips and as you can see i have 500 tips but i thought i'd give you three tips that you could probably implement right now as one is get to know your publishers go to that link and get to know um who's what publishers and what journals are being used in the field where you want to publish if you actually do submit something for publication to one of these journals keep a notes page for each journal on all your submissions really try and do it and if you don't do it and it starts to bite you in the butt right remember this is why i told you to do it see if you can have the discipline right and then three if you can have a colleague act as a pretend reviewer before you submit a paper especially if you're sort of early in your writing career i it's really can be very helpful to shortening the time for peer review even if like if i receive a manuscript and i read it real quick and i'm like oh my god this is really good you know this is really good this is really clear i'll review it right away but if i'm confused and i have to look up a lot of stuff like i don't think they did it right it takes me longer so again that can even shorten the review so one of the things i realized i just said a bunch of is it's really hard to find that colleague to do the review and if you find one um they're not they might not be that good at it because they might be new in their career so i decided to make you a special offer if you're on the live stream and you're watching this later um if you've got a manuscript you're getting ready to submit and you're like monica i'm going to submit this american journal of hypertension and or whatever and you want me to do pretend reviewer i'll do it for 50 bucks it's like a cheap price because normally charge a lot um and so you just all you have to do is send me an email um in reference this this live stream send me an email or um linkedin um with the current word document about and information about where you're submitting it and then um i'll send you a paypal to um pay the fee and then i'll write you a really nice um response and if i've got questions where we can always meet but i'll write you a really nice response so that if you're especially new in publishing you can see an example of a peer review thing that's like customized like my customers always say oh my gosh that was really helpful like because i'll do that with their dissertations and stuff i'll write something like that and they'll be like wow that's helpful to just see that you know um all right so um so we're getting towards the end of the live stream i think this is all the slides i had yeah um and the slides i'm going to start sharing these slides will be available what i'm going to do is i'm going to go through um like the uh this video and change the description on the youtube version of this and put time stamps in and then i'll put the link to the slides so you can download them um but uh so i'm you know it's interesting because again i've got this this restream software and i've got this little thing that says how many people are joining and it has just said zero the whole time but obviously we saw cj and we saw rushly so um i don't know how many people actually watch this and i apologize again um to anybody in linkedin or youtube if you tried to chat and i didn't see it it's not in that overlay where you can see rushly and cj's chat then um it's there's just something wrong with the software um it should work if you're chatting from youtube so um i'm going to just try to disseminate that information each time i hold the live stream but um in any case uh thank you for showing up if you did and thank you for watching this um if you're watching it and it's recorded um it's helpful if you really liked it if you actually think these are good tips please hit the light button because that way people will know that this is a worthwhile video to watch um because you know i i'm going to put this time stamps in there and you know people don't have a lot of time to be honest and that's why i do that i try to make it easy to consume um this information because people are just too busy um and then also like if you like this live stream or if you like this recording you'll consider subscribing to me and and then it'll show up in your feed when i'm doing a live stream i think you have to hit a special notification but what you can do i think when you subscribe to people is you can subscribe to all their notifications and if you do that you'll not only find out that i'm doing this but you'll find out whenever i publish a new video because i'm trying to get more programming videos up and i'm also trying to get more videos up about just bigger picture stuff like application of um our skills in our field because that apparently is is sort of harder you know you can take you can go on data camp you can go on linkedin learning you can you can learn python you know you can do kegel you can do these things but what what about when you go to work and it's not kegel it's the data from work and you have to solve problems at work as a data scientist yeah it's hard so i try to um i'm trying to do more videos where i'm showing use cases and showing how i actually solve problems um because that's the hard part of trying to be uh data scientists after you learn everything um all right so it's saturday and it's beautiful out so hopefully you will have a good weekend and um maybe i'll see you in the chat next week