Select the right journal It is not rare that a high-quality research paper has been rejected by a journal because the research topic is not covered by the journal’s scope and objective. Selecting the right journal is key in reaching out to your intended audience. Invest some time in researching suitable journals for your research work and look for aspects such as scope and objective, impact factor, approximate review time, and audience. Also, check whether the journal of your choice publishes the type of research paper you intend to write. For example, some journals only publish case reports and letters. Submitting a review article to such a journal would end up in rejection and thus a waste of your precious time. In fact, as I mentioned before, if you think you need help with this, you can look for online editing services that provide journal selection as a service. Publication experts will assess your manuscript and your requirements (impact factor, desired publication date, etc.) and provide you with a list of journals that are more likely to find your research appealing.

Structure your paper correctly: There are different types of manuscripts such as case reports, reviews, letters, and original research articles. Each of these article types has a different format, and the format differs slightly from journal to journal. An original research paper would typically follow the IMRAD structure, i.e., introduction, methods, results and discussion. The methods section is typically not required for case reports. Some journals have a prescribed limit even for the number of references. Being aware of these details will help you draft a manuscript that is structured according to the format preferred by the journal.

Make a personal checklist Take some time out and try to remember how your previous manuscript preparation process went. Did you forget to include some readings in the results section? Did you do justice to the discussion section and mention all relevant studies? Did you forget to include the limitations of your study? Did you present numerical readings in text format? (Numerical data are easy to read when presented in tabular form). Have you included inputs from all co-authors? Prepare a checklist that you can go through while preparing your manuscript and avoid the slip-ups you made previously.

Edit, revise, and re-edit Editing is the magical process that will transform your rough draft into a submission-ready manuscript. Once you have collated all the relevant data in the rough draft of your research article, take a break. Yes, take some time off so that you can look at your paper with a fresh perspective and detect gaps in logic or flow. However, it is not easy for the writer to be the editor of his/her own paper. Hence, you could benefit from getting your paper edited by a professional online editing service. Not only will your paper be edited by experts in your area of research but it will also be edited with the aim of adhering to the journal’s requirements (word count, formatting, etc.). Expert editing will improve the readability, clarity, and tone of the text.

Proofread and proofread again Issues such as grammatical mistakes, inconsistencies, and missed words can reduce the quality of your research. A thorough proofread is necessary to eliminate misspellings, grammatical and punctuation errors, inconsistencies, formatting errors, etc. In addition, for an error-free paper, you need to proofread again and again and again. It would help to maintain a checklist of mistakes you often make and look specifically for those. You can also outsource proofreading to one of the many online proofreading services. Many of the online editing services also offer a proofreading service. Professional proofreaders are trained to examine your manuscript with a fine-tooth comb.