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What are some factors that enable some papers to be published in top-tier journals while others (apparently similar) cannot?

For example, in the field of control theory, there are so many papers with complicated mathematics. Some paper is related to a very similar topic, but some get published in a top-tier journal while others not.

This question is important because knowing this, then I know which journal my paper might be submitted to that is possible to be accepted in the end.

This question should actually ask about something different. As it stands, the obvious answer is good papers are accepted in good journals.

The thing here is that knowing a good paper when seeing it comes with experience. There are lots of questions on this site asking "how to know in which journals publish?". This comes from knowing the field, so also comes from experience. At first a researcher has no idea if his research is good or bad – that's why advisors exist (ideally). Then one knows the scope and quality of the major journals in the relevant field. Ultimately, one also knows the quality of one's research, so the question "in which journals should I publish?"/"which journals are worth publishing in?" changes to "what research is worth publishing (at all)?" – and then one aims at the best journals.

To be accepted and published it has to be submitted. Some papers that might be accepted just aren't ever submitted.

Some of it is just luck. The editor was looking for something. Even something as simple or stupid as s/he needed to fill an 8 page gap in an issue and yours was the best available candidate at the moment.

Some of it is just the writing itself. Good journals want, and try to get, well written, understandable, papers. If the reviewers have trouble understanding you, it will be hard to get accepted.

But most of it is that a paper answers a question (or two) that seems important at the time the paper arrives. It is the science/mathematics/whatever behind the paper that really matters. The members of a scientific community are fairly often on the lookout for an answer to a perplexing problem. If you can provide that, and submit a well written paper, you are more likely to get published.

Whenever I read through a paper in a top-tier journal, I will usually notice the paper has top-tier results. However, that is not enough. You also need top-tier presentation, including top-tier figures and top-tier handling of data. For example, if it's possible to use a statistical method and obtain useful results at a 99.9% confidence level, go for it!

To help you getting a paper published in top-tier journal, you can:

• Learn statistical methods.


• Illustrate the paper well with excellent figures. If you need to draw some of the figures, consider hiring a professional graphical artist. However, then you need to set exact criteria for the images (what should they show?) and also have a clear copyright status on the figures. You should also mention who the graphical artist was in your acknowledgements section, so that you don't claim the illustrations made by others as your own.


• Run a professional language check by a native speaker of the language, and you could also consider mentioning this in the acknowledgements section as well, although in this case I don't think omitting the mention would be claiming the work of others as your own work.


• Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite! I would get feedback from several peers, and be prepared to rewrite the entire thing based on their feedback! In fact, I typically start writing at a very early stage, even before I have useful results, and this means I often use content written before the direction of the research was clear. This has led to many rejections. Had I bothered to rewrite, some of those rejections could have been acceptance decisions.


• Be prepared to remove content. Usually, the first version of your paper may be a bit repetitive. Don't repeat, use concise language! If you're prepared to remove content, you can fit more useful content in.


• Be through. Explore all of the implications of your research. A paper that says everything that can be said about a certain idea will be far more successful than a paper that just introduces a concept and makes thoroughly exploring the concept a future research topic. You could also consider criticizing your research and subsequently defending it. For example, I recently submitted a very good paper, which identifies certain anomalies in my solution. I think I was very thorough in listing the anomalies. I also included proof that an anomaly-free solution to the problem I presented cannot exist.


• Underline the importance of your results. Sometimes, you might think the reader ought to know the importance, but better to mention in explicitly. All it takes is few sentences.

However, I would say that you should go through this list only if you have top-tier results in the first place. A paper having mediocre results, but top-tier presentation, top-tier figures and top-tier handling of data will get published only by sheer luck if you're targeting the very best of the journals.

Actually, my personal experience has been that top-tier journals tend to publish articles that are more like summaries of a certain field. Take Nature, the papers you will find in there are either groundbreaking discoveries from CERN or similar institutes, or papers that offer a kind of Big Picture of a certain field.

So I would partially disagree with some of the other answers - it's not all about writing high-quality papers. The content also needs to be what the journals are looking for, and what they want is often not a brilliant, but highly technical paper. Instead they want the paper that summarizes/reviews your brilliant technical paper, together with a dozen others, and offers some general/accessible insight.

And it feels wrong to omit that of course, your standing in the scientific community has some influence. There are exceptions to the rule, but I would imagine that even someone with Einstein-level brilliance would have trouble getting his groundbreaking theoretical paper published in Nature if he is only just starting his PhD. Such is the way of the world.