PSB 68(2) 2022
Demystifying the Manuscript Submission Process Highlights from the Botany360 Workshops presented in May 2022
Navigating the peer review process in scientific journals can be mysterious. Standards for manuscript submission, peer review, and responding to reviewers aren’t always formally taught and can be difficult to understand. Those navigating the review process for the first time often must rely on a network of mentors to maneuver a manuscript from submission to acceptance. To shed some light, a panel of journal editors and authors (Brittany Sutherland, Briana Gross, Pamela Diggle, and myself) provided a behind-the-scenes look at the peer-review process and offered tips for the various stages of publication, from pre-submission through post-acceptance. These sessions focused on BSA-affiliated journals (American Journal of Botany and Applications in Plant Sciences) but are broadly applicable across most biological publications. The event recordings and supporting documents are available on the Botany360 homepage (https://botany.org/ home/resources/botany360.html).
PART 1: WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR PAPER TO A JOURNAL? Publishing your work is vital to science. You publish to share your work with other researchers, the public, the funders who support research, and government agencies— and to move science forward and to advance your career, among other reasons. If you need advice on writing the paper, there are lots of resources available (see, e.g., Heard, 2022; and supporting resources for the workshop). But as you collect and analyze your data and begin thinking of the story you want to tell, and who will be an author and what the order of authors will be, decide on a data management plan; begin organizing your references; and start thinking about possible journals.
Keeping your Data Organized
By Amy McPherson Botanical Society of America ORCID id: 0000-0001-7904-242X
Take it from early career researcher Brittany Sutherland: Keeping your data organized saves you time and effort! Her sage advice, gleaned from experience, is to clearly and consistently label all files and data columns; keep metadata with original data; and don’t 102
