Author: Ignacio Aguaded – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
Sending an article to a scientific journal of high level of excellence is a complex process that requires a previous formation, not drowning in a sea of uncertainties, and specially not to miss, for technical and formal reasons, the magnificent possibility of publishing in a magazine with high impact and visibility to an international level, which implies recognition by the international scientific community about our research work.
One of the main qualities of journals of high level is its transparency in the evaluation processes that tend to be very rigorous but regularized until the extreme to ensure the objectivity and the credibility for all those authors who trust their best and most excellent works for blind review in these selected publications, generally indexed in the two great international impact indexes: Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and Scopus.
These processes of acceptance of works, the scientific community has agreed that the review by «pairs» (scientists at least of the same academic level from the one that writes) is the best formula to evaluate the submitted manuscripts. The excellent magazines have a large list of scientific reviewers, experts in the subject, generally of international character, who almost always collaborate in an altruistic and vocational way in these review processes that, as a general rule, tend to be «double blind» (neither the author knows to those who reviewed it, nor the reviewers know who they reviewed to), so that, they are the editors who have to implement the necessary mechanisms to ensure this double confidentiality that is the guarantor that scientific studies are valued not by labels and the names of its authorship but by the products that are presented for building and improving science.
“Comunicar” has an international Board of Scientific Reviewers, close to 500 researchers from 35 countries that perform this academic task in a vocational way in order to select the best works among the hundreds that are presented. It is necessary to remember that there are very few magazines (the more prestigious) that receive the greater amount of works (all the world wants to publish in the best!), demanding to these headers not only rigorous selective processes, agile and transparent but also complex by the number of manuscripts that are received. There is one of the keys of the best publications: to know how to handle this voluminous number of works with quality and also with satisfaction of the authors even if their products are not finally selected.
Therefore, it is so important to count with review protocols that are public (known both by reviewers and authors and readers) so that the evaluation is more transparent and objective as possible into the anonymity that has to be kept throughout the process to protect authors, reviewers and editors in the process.
“Comunicar” has three sections on its website to facilitate authors all this process. On the one hand, the «Regulations» section includes general rules to publish in the journal, with remarkable specification of subjects and selection processes, being a real manual’s publication that we recommend to read thoroughly. It also includes a practical «Prior checking» that allows you to do a test with short questions. In this section, other documents of interest are presented as «Structure of manuscripts» (normally the magazines require several files, including the blind manuscript (anonymized) and a page of credits and assignment of rights («title page » and «cover letter») that in some cases, as in “Comunicar” by simplicity, they join into a single file. Other documents of interest that our magazine includes are «explaining videos the entire process», links to APA norms, recommendation for the standardization of the names of the authors, links to ORCID portals and ResearcherID, models of letters of presentation, links to manuscript submission manager and even the files that reviewers have present at the time to review the manuscripts, so that the authors can get to know what indicators are going to be especially evaluated in their works. In the section «Send a manuscript» it connects directly with our portal OJS (Open Journal System) that allows making the process of submitting of works in an automated way with register of the entire process.
To sum up, it is a complete adventure for making visible our investigations in the best publications and platforms of broadcasting of science of the world: the journals of high impact.
