Forum:Seeking for Scientific Crticism

Question

[Bara'a]

Greetings to all :)

I have finished my M.Sc. thesis 8 months ago in comparative genomes field , but I didn't have any chances to get my work published ,unfortunately.

Where can I find a committee for free scientific criticism , to see if my work worth publishing or not ?!

I just need some guidance to further develop my work to be acceptable in the scientific community , because my supervisor is extremely busy .

I don't want to feel that I have wasted 2 years of my life for nothing , I'm more than ready to hear opinions :)

Thanks to all in advance.

Answer 1

[jotan]

You could try PubPeer to see if anyone would be interested in helping critique your work

https://pubpeer.com/

Also have a look at F1000, which has a different model of publishing and see if that might work for you.

http://f1000research.com/about

[Bara'a]

@jotan 1982 ... Thank you for giving me those direct links, I own you a favor.

I will check them out immediately, Can't thank you enough :)

Answer 2

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

As long as you learned something, you haven't wasted two years of your life for nothing.

I also worked for at least two-three years at the beginning without publishing nothing. It's part of the process and everybody has to go through it :-). Try to think of what you learned and how you can apply the skills you acquired to other fields.

If you want to post your work somewhere you can try biorxiv, but make sure the other authors agree on it.You may not get a lot of comments at the beginning (the scientific community is not very active on commenting preprints), but at least you will get recognition for your work.

[DG]

Yup, lots of people's Masters work never gets published. Or only gets published years later as part of a larger project. A preprint is a good idea but I'm also stressing the authorship issues. Discuss this with your supervisor as both the Master's student and the supervisor "own" the work.

[Bara'a]

I'm still trying to contact my supervisor to discuss the publishing issue, lets hope he got some free time for me :(

[Bara'a]

Hhhhh ... I'm trying to get over it :3 I will consider your advice, and give it some time to worth publishing. Thanks for the site you suggested, I will try my luck :)

Answer 3

[karl.stamm]

It's your supervisors job to teach things like this.

We will not be able to fill that role completely. And this question may be closed as off-topic for biostars.

Briefly my advice is to find a target journal, read several of their articles, then format your work so that it looks just like something that has been published. Similar content, and structure. Read their "instructions for authors" to see what the recommended sections and lengths are.

Then submit. The editor and the peer review system will tell you how well suited the material is. Each journal has different ideas of what they want to publish, so you just have to find the right one. If you have a useful advance of any kind, some journal will be interested. If you are repeating others' work, it may not be interesting.

[Bara'a]

Thanks a lot @karl.stamm for the comprehensive reply. I guess that I have done some good work, but still the decision is not mine to determine so, I will contact some Journals in the field regarding this.

Thanks again, truly appreciate it.

Answer 4

[dariober]

Since your are posting on Biostars... If your work includes some code you have written for, say, a standalone program or even some analyses, consider opening an account on github and put your code there well documented. (If you are comfortable making it available to the public of course).

In addition to karl.stamm's answer, some journals accept pre-submission enquires to quickly check whether they are interested in your work. It's less commitment than submitting a polished manuscript up front.

[Bara'a]

@dariober ... In fact, my work is a pythonic pipeline to analyze some eukaryotic genomes in plants kingdom to extract the evolutionary path from their preserved SSR around the crossing over spots.

I hope it's something worth publishing, I'm not sure yet :/

Thanks for your help, I have to discuss this matter with my supervisor if I decided to make the code available for public.