6 tips for passing F1000Research prepublication checks
| 23 June, 2022 | Rebecca Hinsley |
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Are you thinking about submitting to F1000Research? Consider these tips from our editorial team to avoid any hold-ups and ensure your research is shared rapidly.
F1000Research’s model is built on total transparency and is set up to avoid editorial bias. While there is no Editor (or Editor-Chief) to accept or reject an article, our in-house editorial team diligently checks every submitted article to ensure it meets our quality and ethical standards.
To help ensure your article passes this initial check, we’ve asked our team for their top tips on how to pass each of the six criteria we assess. Let’s get started with our first requirement: authorship and author affiliation.
1. Authorship and author affiliation
Authors must be formally affiliated with an accredited institution or recognized organization to be able to publish with F1000Research. Author affiliation is verified through institutional/organizational email address AND institutional/organizational website profile (or other means).
Please note that some Gateways have more specific criteria; details can be found in each Gateway under “About this Gateway”.
If you wish to submit your research but don’t meet these criteria, you’ll need to supply an endorsement by an experienced researcher who does meet our authorship criteria.
Editor’s tip
“Regardless of discipline, all articles must include at least one author who meets the key authorship criteria, and this author should have made a key contribution to the article.” — Lisa De Silva, Senior Assistant Editor
2. Plagiarism
All articles submitted to F1000Research must be original. The work, or significant parts of it, must not have been published previously or be currently under consideration or review elsewhere. F1000Research uses Crossref’s similarity checker (iThenticate) to check for plagiarism in articles. Our team will reject the article if apparent plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, is identified.
Editor’s tip
“Avoid including extensive quotations from any one source in particular and be mindful of excessive or inappropriate self-citations.” — David Sadler, Associate Editor
3. Data and data availability statement
One of the most common reasons why articles are rejected from publication on our Platform is that the supporting data is not openly available. At F1000Research, we stand by our open data policy and endorse the FAIR Data Principles.
Authors must deposit the dataset(s) underlying their results in an appropriate data repository. The dataset(s) must have a license applied which allows reuse by others (CC0 or CC-BY) and must have a persistent identifier (e.g., a DOI), allocated by a data repository. You must also provide a data availability statement as a section at the end of your article, detailing the aforementioned.
We recognize that openly sharing data may not always be feasible due to ethical considerations or third-party restrictions. As such, we have policies in place to allow the publication of papers associated with such data in a way that is as open as possible but as closed as necessary.
Don’t forget to read our data guidelines and data policies before you submit. We also have a variety of resources for researchers in our Open Data Toolkit, including guides on writing a data availability statement, sharing sensitive data, and more.
Editor’s tip
“Always include a data availability statement at the end of your manuscript, even if your paper doesn’t have any underlying data. Our data guidelines include example text for these. If openly sharing your article data may not be feasible, please explain this at the submission stage by outlining the circumstances in your data availability statement and adding a note within the submission system. If you have any queries, you can also contact the editorial team.” — Florence Theil, Senior Assistant Editor
4. Ethics and consent
F1000Research adheres to the COPE guidelines relating to ethical oversight. If your research involves humans, animals, or plants, you must comply with our ethical policies. Ethics approval should be obtained in advance for all studies involving human individuals, data, or material.
Editor’s tip
“Some articles don’t include any ethical or consent information upon submission. Often, this is because the author does not deem the participant data included in the paper to be sensitive or identifying. Nonetheless, we would still expect the authors to have obtained informed, preferably written, consent, and if ethical approval was waived by a review board, this should be stated in the ethics statement.” — Deirbhile McQuillan, Senior Assistant Editor
5. Scope
We accept a broad range of traditional and non-traditional article types across the physical and life sciences, engineering, medicine, social sciences, and humanities. All research outputs must represent scholarly work based on scientific investigation or academic inquiry.
Our editorial team also looks at whether a paper has followed the appropriate reporting guidelines for the study design and included sufficient methodological detail.
Editor’s tip
‘This sounds obvious, but it’s vital authors thoroughly read the relevant article guidelines for whichever article type they are submitting. This is not only critical for ensuring you are submitting your article under the appropriate article type, but to also ensure the article’s content meets the scope, word count, reporting guidelines, and content requirements of that particular article type.” — Joseph Dunn, Assistant Editor
6. Language
Articles on F1000Research should be well-written and language quality shouldn’t impede understanding of the research. If our team thinks an article needs extensive copyediting, they will reject it and alert the author to some professional copyediting services they may wish to consider.
Editor’s tip
“It goes without saying that rigorously checking your article before submission is key to catching those easy-to-miss typos. However, if English is not your first language or if you’re unsure whether the language quality is satisfactory, consider asking a native English speaker to proofread the article or have it professionally copyedited before submitting to ensure readability and flow.” — Jessica Torr, Editorial Lead (HSS)
Be sure to consider these six tips before hitting the submit button! For further details on our specific submission requirements, read our article guidelines and policies today.
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