How to boost your academic career

Rigours of publication lead to stronger science

Getting into a journal is never easy. Robert Aldridge is professor of public health data science at the Institute of Health Informatics at University College London. He recalls the bracing process involved in publishing a paper in The Lancet, the world’s highest-impact medical journal.

“I remember going into the office and meeting with Richard Horton [editor-in-chief] and the peer reviewers for one paper. It was brutal. They tore it to bits! We left the meeting feeling despondent, but ultimately it really improved it and made it a lot better. There’s no doubt it pushed us and got us thinking about the topic in a different way. They help you understand limitations that can be dealt with in future research.”

Peer reviewers – academic experts from the field that journals identify for each paper, and who undertake their work on a voluntary basis as part of an informal code of academic life – offer insights from their own speciality, which enrich an author’s research and illuminate implications they may not have been aware of. Liudmila Andreeva, a structural immunologist and biochemist, recalls the value of the review process in her paper in Cell, a leading journal in experimental biology. Working with Cell reviewers, she says, helped her contextualise her research in the broader field. “Some suggestions were from reviewers working on a different protein that uses the same mechanism [that she had studied]. It expanded my understanding.”

Reaching the audience that matters

In public health, researchers want to ensure their findings reach the decision-makers with power, most often policymakers. Time-pressed civil servants and politicians in governments and health agencies value the input of the scientific community, but keeping abreast of the latest research is a tall order. For academic experts, prestigious publications give them a direct line to the people who can act on their findings. “Policymakers have to be picky because they’ve got many journals to read,” says Aldridge.

His past work on tuberculosis and migration, published in The Lancet, had significant policy implications on the issue of screening migrants arriving in high-income countries from poor nations. Tuberculosis can be dormant and reactivate later when immunity wanes or is compromised. That means migrants should be actively screened to ensure they receive medical support in the event of an active infection. Aldridge believes The Lancet’s reach and reputation helped support the dissemination and uptake of his findings. “It gets read and highly cited by international policymakers and used in the development of tuberculosis screening policy,” he says, adding that the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have both used the research.

Aldridge also recalls how a further time-critical correspondence in The Lancet that explained how quickly Covid vaccine antibodies waned, was published “really quickly, and having that piece in The Lancet got it to an audience that we wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.”

Careers boosted as the news spreads

While policymakers are one important audience for scientific researchers, journal publications can enter the popular imagination in ways that promote public engagement in science, and can help boost careers and funding.

This is common in areas such as nutrition, where the latest science on the risks (or benefits) of meat, wine or chocolate are often taken up in the health sections of newspapers. Scientific publications also contain rich, colourful stories of the wonders of nature that can strike a chord with the public and encourage greater interest and curiosity in science.

Marie Dacke, professor of sensory biology at Lund University in Sweden, specialises in understanding the visual performance of organisms including insects, fish and spiders. In one memorable project, she worked with a team to understand how dung beetles navigate and steer straight. In 2013, she published a paper in Current Biology, a Cell Press journal, showing how dung beetles use the milky way for orientation. The paper was a follow-on project from an earlier published research that had been important for her career at the time as a PhD student.

“We put out the first beetle and it moved in a straight line. Then the second and the third. I got very curious as the beetles were behaving in a way that contradicted what I had found and published before,” she says. The team thought it might be related to other visual cues, like a fire in the distance. They eventually discovered that beetles could navigate by starlight and the findings popped up on news sites around the world. She won the Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award that honours quirky achievements that ‘first make people laugh, then make them think’. A few months later, it featured on The Big Bang Theory, an American sitcom, and a David Attenborough programme also included a segment about navigating beetles. Dacke says: “It sparked people’s interest because it’s such a beautiful story.”

Building research networks and collaboration

In the competitive world of academia, peer-reviewed publications help early career researchers build networks. “I’m a postdoc and I think all postdocs have the same feeling: we are under extreme pressure because we want to prove that we are worthy as independent scientists,” says Andreeva.

“Because my paper was published in Cell, my network just boomed, everybody saw my name and everybody saw my work. That was very rewarding.”

Robert Aldridge, who now mentors and supports early career researchers, says recognition from the journals themselves can help. A former recipient of The Lancet Early Career Researcher prize, Aldridge recalls the value in being able to show he had won a nationally recognised medical research award. He also worked with the journal to set up The Lancet Public Health Science Conference in 2012 to champion research. “It has been a huge way of bringing people in public health together across the country and supporting early career researchers. It’s a really nice example of The Lancet supporting the development of early career researchers, and it enabled me to give those researchers a platform by creating, supporting and sharing the conference. I’ve also made direct contact with hundreds of public health academics in the UK who I wouldn’t have otherwise as a result of organising that conference.”

Networks and collaborations are key in research, with papers frequently including multiple authors and institutions, all bringing unique and distinctive expertise. And academic publications are a powerful force in connecting geographically disparate experts. Kei Sato, professor at the Institute of Medical Science in the University of Tokyo, published ground-breaking research in Cell Host & Microbe, sister journal of Cell, on how mutations in viral genes influenced infectivity and immunity. Those papers helped him to secure a $1m grant from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED). They also prompted a Twitter exchange with Ravindra Gupta, professor of clinical microbiology at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease at the University of Cambridge, who asked Sato to collaborate on further research into viral mutation.

They began working together, with Sato joining forces with G2P-UK, a research consortium, and G2P-Japan online, connecting with G2P-UK members in Belfast, London, the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh.

Journals can shape scientific endeavour

Peer-review journals are more than compendiums of individual research papers. At their best, they can proactively shine a light on neglected topics and, through commissioning endeavours, give shape and name to emerging fields. 

The nexus of migration and health, Aldridge’s domain, is one example. Migration raises many policy questions, from the rights of overseas migrants to healthcare to the role of language barriers, cultures and beliefs in shaping health access. But the intersection of migration and health was until recently a niche, neglected area.

Aldridge cites The Lancet’s Commission series, which identifies the most pressing issues in science, medicine and global health, as influential in profiling neglected research and drawing together strands of work into new disciplinary domains. He published two pieces through The Lancet Commission and UCL-Lancet Commission on migration and health and now, he says: “It is squarely on the global agenda. We went to the UN Global Compact on migration with the outputs of the research, and it had not just an impact on my career, but also on the topic itself by giving it that platform.”

Aldridge recalls the same dynamic following research he carried out on inclusion health, which relates to the health of people experiencing homelessness, sex work and drug use. “We published… and it changed the landscape. Inclusion health has gone from being something that people didn’t really know or talk about, to being on the agenda. People now use the word ‘inclusion health’ and understand what works, partly because of that piece.”

Peer review is evolving

Peer review is a foundation of science, promoting breakthroughs and weeding out weak or unoriginal research. The model is not perfect, of course, and journals are evolving too. During Covid, for example, a “pre-print” model emerged in which important findings were released in a matter of days or weeks, and subjected to review only later. That had genuine value and could become a more common part of what has been a slow publishing model, says Aldridge.

There has also been progress in redressing the gender imbalance in publications, led by visionaries like Jocalyn Clark, formerly an executive editor of The Lancet, and initiatives such as #LancetWomen. Transparency is also improving with initiatives such as the Gender Dashboard which provides an overview of the number of self-reported female editors as well as the aspiration targets and representation of women across the field on all of Elsevier's journals' websites. The Lancet journals editorial boards have already a 50%-50% gender balance, and Cell Press exceeded its pledge to achieve 30% women representation in 2020.

But Aldridge says there is more to do: researchers from poorer countries, for example, are at a disadvantage when it comes to their networks and familiarity with how high-impact journals evaluate papers. They can also lack the support mechanisms that is needed to deal with the feedback and not be put off from doing further research, something Aldridge says he was privileged to have access to at University College London during the peer review process.

Elsevier's certified peer reviewer course, connected to the Reviewer Hub volunteer-to-review is a step in the right direction, helping onboard researchers with different levels of expertise and those from under-represented countries and regions. Other initiatives include flagging newly accepted authors to editors as potential reviewers to help editors identify relevant, and likely willing and motivated, reviewers from countries in the Global South such as India and Brazil. Results so far show that recently accepted authors are more likely to agree to review.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools also contribute to solving problems for the research community. First, by helping authors succeed in publishing by supporting them to find the right journal to submit to with JournalFinder; offering the best alternative Elsevier journal after rejection with Resubmission Assistant; identifying missing elements of a paper before revision with Submission Check and accelerated publication of Covid content with the Covid Relevancy Algorithm.

Second, by helping editors to be more effective and efficient by finding reviewers and diversifying the pool with Reviewer Recommender; assisting editors evaluate the fit of a manuscript to their journal with Scope Match; and identifying manuscripts that have already been submitted to another Elsevier journal with Duplicate Submission Check. 

Several AI projects are in development to provide further tools for editors and reviewers to prevent and detect research integrity issues. Some of the tools include detection of very similar articles submitted multiple times or already published elsewhere, and the identification of articles based on fake research data, plagiarism, and types of other outlier behaviour.

The value of peer-review publications will in coming years be extended to everyone based on merit, to the advantage of public health and knowledge for all. That is certain to nurture a new generation of scientific careers, take novel ideas and insights to their audiences, and foster the collaborations and networks that are so vital to scientific enterprise.