Crafting a Paper for Publication

The relationship between doing good research and getting the research published is not a causal one. At best, there is a correlation between the quality of a research paper and its being accepted for publication. A research paper’s becoming accepted for publication is ultimately a social process, which exists in addition to and is no less important than the content of the paper itself. In this article, I examine how the social process can influence the crafting of a paper for submission to a journal, and re-crafting it in the event that the journal’s editor asks for a revision.