Q: I have to write a publication plan for my research work? how do i start on it?

Thank you for your query! Ideally, your research publication plan should develop from a long-term goal covering the next 3 years or so, addressing whether you wish to publish in a journal, present at conferences, or both and if so, how often; this will also depend on the schedule of your research work and other commitments. Working backwards from this, you can then determine when you would like to complete major publications such as journal articles or conference papers. Creating such a long-term plan will allow you to factor in things like time taken for peer review (which can be anything from a few months to even a couple of years), and it’s important to retain some flexibility in your plan to accommodate this.

For individual publications, it’s helpful to begin with an idea of the basic format—determine whether a full paper or a short communication would better answer your needs in terms of comprehensiveness versus speed of publication, as short communications are specifically utilized for studies where primacy or rapid publication are important considerations. Based on this, you can then shortlist the best journals in which to publish your study—remember that you can have only one active submission at a time, so balance the requirements of the most suitable audience and the best relevance to your study with the journal’s prestige, reach, or rank.

Once you have chosen your journals and ranked them in order of priority, you can start drafting the manuscript keeping in mind the formatting and publication requirements of your top choice journal. This is important as many journals have specific rules regarding how sections are to be written or formatted, and the writing process is much smoother if the manuscript is written to conform to these rules, rather than if they have to be imposed on an already written manuscript—for example, if the journal requires a combined Results and Discussion section, it is easier to write a combined section at the outset rather than combine two separate, already written sections. The conventional wisdom for order of writing is to start with the methods, then the results, then the discussion and conclusion, and finally the introduction and the title and abstract. Having general outlines for each of these sections before you begin writing is immensely helpful.

You can find more comprehensive inputs, as well as a downloadable template to write your own publication plan, here: A step-by-step guide to creating a journal publication schedule (Download - Journal publication planning template)