I think having a widely-read paper in a high-impact journal is a good thing, if it is actually widely read.

And, I think, being in a higher impact journal is more likely to make the paper highly read. At least it should help in getting it noticed. But, of course, that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be read or cited.

I work at an interface of three disciplines – biology, physics and chemistry – there is no particular ‘journal’ for interdisciplinary work

*cough*

These are important points, Sylvia. How can we be sure that the REF panels won’t take the IF (or ‘perceived quality’) of a journal into account when they review the submissions?

My vote (which I apologise for repeating on OT, but I’d really like to get the message across), would be for submission of ‘pre-print’ formats of the published papers, so the REF panel simply can’t take journal ‘quality’ into account, even subconsciously.

Either that, or for them to explicitly admit that they will take these sort of metrics into account, so we can all set about gaming the system appropriately (and equally).

Another problem I’ve got with colleagues advice is that they tend to forget what they said last time they had a look at my manuscript. I have a hard time not going postal every time one of my co-authors suggests we should write something in a manuscript because it would be important for the reviewers to know we thought about this – while in the last feedback iteration, it was crystal clear I should not mention it because it would rather distress the reviewers and could deliver a leaver to reject the paper.

Both problems boil down to this: I care too much.
I like the stuff I wrote. At least sometimes. I did think about it. A lot. In fact, if I’m the first author, I am usually the one who really, really thought about how to put the results in words. Unambiguously. My colleagues have a lot of other stuff on their mind, and they simply don’t care.
If I would not care so much, it would be easier to let go and not be annoyed by the third time someone comments on my wording or phrasing which I chose for a particular reason.

My advice for successfully integrate advice into your work, therefore, would be: don’t care to much. Neither about people changing your stuff (just accept it, if it’s not really appalling or outrageously wrong) nor about the stuff itself. If you care too much about your science, you will never get published. And it’s getting published what counts, at least in most faculties.

One of the most notorious was the choice of the B-side to the single of Bohemian Rhapsody (written by Mercury). As far as I remember it was a Roger Taylor song, but whatever it was would earn largely off the back of Bohemian Rhapsody.

After many, many years, the members decided to bury their respective hatchets and attribute every Queen song to all the members of Queen, irrespective of whoever came up with the song originally, and divide the spoils equally. The result was instant amity and harmony and they wondered why they hadn’t done it years ago.

I have heard that groups of artists putting on collective shows trade under the name of a single, fictitious entity: and that a group of French mathematicians once worked under the collective name of Nicolas Bourbaki – which was the name of none of them. Very large groups of scientists sometimes publish under group names (‘The SMURF Detector Experiment Analysis Team’, ‘The Cross-Eyed Newt Genome Consortium’ and so on and so forth in like fashion.) Perhaps smaller groups of scientists could do the same?

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