The_Davster
A pnictogen
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Registered: 18-11-2003
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Publications as an individual
Anyone know anything about submitting publications to journals not as a university affiliated researcher?
Just curious, it may come up for some of us at some point.
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Nicodem
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Registered: 28-12-2004
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Actually it can be done and from what I heard it was already done. It will not be easy though. The editor will be influenced by your lack of
affiliation to an institution and you not having previous publications. He will be suspicious that you might want to publish something you obtained
working for a group in an institution without their knowledge. So you would probably have to explain your situation. Note that hobby chemistry is
indirectly illegal in many countries (in EU for sure, don’t know about Canada), since you need a special permit to store hazardous chemicals, so
perhaps you should avoid calling what you do as “hobby chemistry”. Try some other excuse. The editors are generally also very touchy if
you are not their subscriber. The paper will have to pass through the peer review system meaning it will have to:
- be written in a scientific discourse;
- conform to the editors rules of format and content and being relevant to the journal topic;
- have enough examples of whatever reaction you want to publish;
- have all the analyses done in order to prove the identity of the compounds as well as the complete characterization for any new compounds.
Obviously the last one is the only completely impossible thing for a hobby chemist. So you will need someone at the university to do you the m.p., IR,
NMR, MS, elemental analysis or HRMS and so on.
It is probably best to first try to publish in a less demanding journal with a low impact factor. They are more likely to accept anything if they have
less requests for publication. They generally also have lower criteria for compound identification. In many journals a mp, IR and HNMR is already more
than enough (don’t know about inorganic chemistry journals though). It would be hard to get trough with a letter/communication instead of a full
paper since these are based on confidence and academic title (that’s why letters are so often abused and contain so much bullshit). Don’t give up
if refused, just send to another journal. Once you have a publication it will be easier to publish further on in some better journals.
…there is a human touch of the cultist “believer” in every theorist that he must struggle against as being
unworthy of the scientist. Some of the greatest men of science have publicly repudiated a theory which earlier they hotly defended. In this lies their
scientific temper, not in the scientific defense of the theory. - Weston La Barre (Ghost Dance, 1972)
Read the The ScienceMadness Guidelines!
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