Process to write Research Papers and Journals for Data Scientists

What is a Research Paper?

A research paper is an expanded essay that presents your own interpretation or evaluation or argument. When you write an essay, you use everything that you personally know and have thought about a subject. When you write a research paper you build upon what you know about the subject and make a deliberate attempt to find out what experts know. A research paper involves surveying a field of knowledge in order to find the best possible information in that field. And that survey can be orderly and focused, if you know how to approach it.

Let’s look at various reasons to publish a research paper

• Recognition
• Discoverability
• Reusability
• Awareness
• Accessibility
• Peer-review
• Technology

Writing a research paper – where to start?

Publishing an article in a journal

Think about your goal:

• Get cited by other researchers
• Add a novel solution or perspective to the literature
• Influence practice or policy

• Identifying (and reading!) target journals first is important
• Journals have different:

• Aims and scope
• Style guides and formats
• Audiences
• Ethical guidelines
• Data sharing requirements

Top 20 Journals for Data Scientists

• IEEE Access
• Springer International Journal of Data Science and Analytics
• CODATA Data Science Journal
• Computational Statistics & Data Analysis by IASC (International Association for Statistical Computing)
• Journal of Big Data
• Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning
• International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining
• Sigkdd Explorations
• Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS)
• Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
• International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining
• Springer Machine Learning
• Elsevier Pattern Recognition
• Elsevier Neurocomputing
• Elsevier Information Sciences
• IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
• Springer International Journal of Computer Vision
• Journal of Machine Learning research (The MIT Press)

Identifying a Target Journal

Some Terms to Remember

Open Access Publication

• Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors. 
• While OA is a newer form of scholarly publishing, many OA journals comply with well-established peer-review processes and maintain high publishing standards.

Subscription based Publication

Subscription-based journals typically require readers to pay for the content that they read. This has been the model followed traditionally in the academic publishing industry. Since individuals or institutions have to pay subscription charges, only those who have purchased a subscription to the journal/have purchased an article will have access to your paper. 

Article Processing Charges (APC)

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors to make a work available open access in either an open access journal or hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author’s institution, or their research funder.  Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice

ORCID ID

• The ORCID  (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID’s website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic output (and other user-supplied pieces of information).
• This addresses the problem that a particular author’s contributions to the scientific literature or publications in the humanities can be hard to recognize as most personal names are not unique, they can change (such as with marriage), have cultural differences in name order, contain inconsistent use of first-name abbreviations and employ different writing systems. It provides a persistent identity for humans, similar to tax ID numbers, that are created for content-related entities on digital networks by digital object identifiers (DOIs).

Peer Review

• You will have to pass through a round of peer review before your paper is published.
• Peer review is often very difficult and time- consuming, but essential to refining your work.
• Sometimes you may not even make it as far as peer review – an editor may reject your paper (‘desk rejection’) because it does not meet the scope of the journal.
• This is why it’s important to read the ‘Aims and Scope’ and ‘Instructions to Authors’ pages

Embargo Period

When an author decides to self-archive their research outputs in an Open Access repository they need to observe any embargo period a publisher might have in place. In practice this means that the author submits the research article to the institutional repository but only the metadata will be made openly accessible during the embargo period. Once the embargo period expires, the full-text article is released to the open web. Embargo periods vary between a few months to a few years.

Crossreference

• Cross reference is a reference to information located somewhere else in the same document. 
• In both printed and online dictionaries cross-references are important because they form a network structure of relations existing between different parts of data, dictionary-internal as well as dictionary external. In an index, a cross-reference is often denoted by See also.

Things to Remember…

• Carry out research in proper a way.
• Make sure you are submitting to the most suitable journal
• Understand the costs and funding options
• Make sure your manuscript is accurate and readable
• Understand the copyright agreement
• You need to mention all your sources or the data sets which you are taking
• Don’t just copy and paste things. It should be original !!! 
• If taking help from some books or sites you should mention them in references part.
• Follow the proper order for table of contents for the Journal.
• Article should be published in only one Journal.
• Journals follow a through process for Peer-Review.
• They have Anti-Plagiarism softwares with them
• If your article contains some images make sure they are of high quality.
• If you have some videos related to your research paper the it should be submitted in the supplementary material.
• They have fixed the size for images or videos 
• See the metrics for the Journal you are submitting you article.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Related Literature
• Preliminaries
• Process
• Research Issues
• Applications
• Suggestions for future works
• Conclusion
• Availability of data and materials
• Keywords
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• References
• Authors
• Additional Information

Submission checklist

• Manuscript as a PDF in double column, single-spaced format using one of the required  article templates.  Templates for various formats like Microsoft Word and LaTex are provided on the Journal’s official site.
• Author lists should be carefully considered before submission(Changes to author list post acceptance are not allowed.)
• Corresponding authors are required to have an ORCID ID associated with their account in ScholarOne Manuscripts. 
• Short biographies are required for ALL authors. As per the required templates, biographies of all authors should be added to the article below the references.
• All authors should be listed on both the manuscript PDF as well as on the author list within ScholarOne Manuscripts.
• The article should be thoroughly reviewed for proper grammar before being submitted. Articles with poor grammar will be immediately rejected.
• All research works should be carefully referenced. 
• The article should not be submitted elsewhere at the same time. 
• Supplemental material (if any)
• Manuscript keywords (minimum of 3 and maximum of 10).  Please carefully select the keywords as this is how they select a relevant Associate Editor to manage the peer review of your article.
• Some Journals give you freedom to give names of the opposed reviewers(if any)
• Video and Images (Please look at the size permitted by the Journal)
• If the article was previously rejected after peer review with encouragement to update and resubmit, then a complete “list of updates” must be included in a separate document. The list of updates should have the following regarding each comment: 1) reviewers’ concerns, 2) authors’ response to the concerns, 3) actual changes implemented.
• Some Journals have page limits while some of the Journals don’t have any such restrictions. But it is strongly recommended to complete your research within 50 pages.
• Manuscripts follow a logical, standard structure in the following order: abstract (no more than 250 words), introduction, materials and methods, results (in case of a research paper), discussion.
• You should give your data source for reference

Stages of peer review from submission to accept/reject decision

• Anti-plagiarism Checking

• Upon submission, each article will automatically be run through plagiarism software to check for similarity to other published work, including an author’s own work. If any issues are detected, the article will be immediately rejected, and may result in further investigation and/or corrective actions.
• A combination of pre-screening and open access is the best possible defence against plagiarism. All articles submitted to Journals are automatically screened for plagiarism by the CrossCheck system from CrossRef. This system compares incoming articles to a large database of academic content, and alerts editors to any possible issues.

• Rigorous Peer Review

Journal ensures that all research output, in both journals and books, is thoroughly peer-reviewed by external reviewers, and offer the option of open peer review if required. Publications of a commentary or opinion nature may not be sent for external peer review but will include extensive editorial review and revisions. Through membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE),  editors and editorial boards receive ethical guidance and professional networking. All journals adhere to the COPE guidelines for best practice

• Open Licenses

All content is released under open licenses from Creative Commons. They believe that only CC BY meets the requirements for true open access for books and journals, and strongly prefer CC0 for open research data.

• Research Data

All journals and books strongly encourage authors to make the research objects associated with their publications openly available. This includes research data, software, bioresources and methodologies. This means that peer reviewers are able to better assess the foundations of claims made, and the research community and wider public are able to similarly validate authors’ work, and are more easily able to extend and build upon it.

• Indexing

All content is indexed with CrossRef and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This means that all of their references are made available so that citations can be tracked by the publishing community, and the content is added to the Cross-Check anti-plagiarism database.

Citation of an article using DOI

• With Online First publication, the time it takes for critical discoveries to reach the research community is significantly reduced.
• Online First lets users access peer reviewed articles well before print publication. These articles are searchable and citable by their DOI (Digital Object Identifier). Formatting depends on the reference style of the journal, but in principle you can simply use the DOI instead of volume and page numbers, as in the following example:

Gamelin FX, Baquet G, Berthoin S, Thevenet D, Nourry C, Nottin S, Bosquet L (2009) Effect of high intensity intermittent training on heart rate variability in prepubescent children. Eur J Appl Physiol. doi: 10.1007/s00421-008-0955-8

Copyright

• After you submit final files you will automatically be directed to the Electronic Copyright Form. Since many journals are open access journals,therefore all articles will be published under either the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) or the Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, No Derivatives License (CCBY-NC-ND).
• CC BY and CCBY-NC-ND allow authors to retain copyright of their article and permit a very broad range of reuse. Under CC BY, reuse for commercial purposes or to create derivative works is permitted, whereas under CCBY-NC-ND, reuse cannot be for commercial purposes or change the work in any way. Under the CC BY licenses, authors are responsible for protecting their content from possible abuses such as infringement and plagiarism.
• Authors will be asked to select CC BY or CCBY-NC-ND prior to publication.

Publication

• Once you have completed all the steps and your copyright information is completed, then the Journals which are open access they will send you email to settle your APC(Article Processing Charges) by credit card, debit card or any other medium which the Journal uses.
• There are many waivers or discounts that may vary for different Journals. Please refer to their sites for any such information.
• Now, after completing all your payments and previous steps now your article is ready to publish.
• Different Journals have their own metrics for publishing your article.

After publication

• Citation Alert-

Your article makes an impact. Now they’ll tell you about it!

• Article-level metrics-

Explore how your article is being cited, used and discussed in the social web! 

• Marketing to worldwide audiences-

Their global marketing approach centers on customer channels – treating each of their audience groups in a way that addresses their unique needs

Promote your article to achieve a bigger impact for your work

• To effectively spread the news about your research and your publications, it will be important to become an active and trusted member of the online communities. Your visibility will increase and this can lead to more downloads and citations for your articles. 
• You can also promote your article via your own email lists, online links, listservs, distribution at conferences and any other innovative techniques you wish to adopt.

Helpful Competiton

• The COADATA connect Early Carrer and Alumni Network in collaboration with the CODATA Data Science Journal organized an Essay Competition for Early Carrer Researchers(ECR),defined as UG, Graduates, PG students or early carrer researchers with five years of completing the highest qualification.
• Topic : “ Open data challenges to address Global and Societal issues”
• It was conducted for 3 months. 

Some Scenario Based Questions

What should I do if my article got rejected?

• First, don’t get demotivated.
• Focus on what your editor had sent you for improvement.
• Improve all the concerns of the editor and send your article back for the process.

What if I have my own website and I wrote articles on this website and I want to include that information in my research paper?

• Add this information the Additional Information part as mentioned in Table of Contents.
• You can even write mail to your Journal Editor to add to his knowledge about this information.

How can I check for plagiarism by my own before submitting my article?

• There are various anti-plagiarism softwares available online you can use them to check the percentage of plagiarism before submitting your article to Journal Editor for publishing.

What sites should I refer for selecting a proper journal for my research paper?

• I recommend you to refer to the official site of the Journal for all the information.
• If referring to any other site be aware of fake information.