“School of Authors” is a website from Comunicar, Scientific Journal in Education and Communication, indexed in main international data bases, that complements other websites in Spanish, English and Portuguese. “School of Authors” is written and edited, basically, by the Editorial Board of “Comunicar” and it aims to offer different sources, for manuscript submissions in scientific journals in a planned and strategic manner. It is intended to make authors think about scientific information management for publishing scientific manuscripts in high impact journals.

Search for topics and other descriptors in Scopus/WoS

Scopus® and Web of Science® are intranets of payment oriented to scientific searches that allow to support investigations through bibliographical sources of quality and with high level of cites, as it allows to recognize, limit and refine the search to those scientific journals that incorporate similar studies. The institutions of Higher Education, especially the universities contract collective subscriptions of these services benefiting the revision of documents of quality, exceeding the typical search on Google Scholar, by containing multiple files of refining as theme, topic, tittle, authors, name of the publication, DOI, language, type of document, ISSN, key words, summary, among others.

The search system of Scopus® is classified in 27 main thematic areas and 313 specific categories, among which outstand the medicine area with 48 and social sciences with 23 specific categories. Within the advanced search the investigator could opt for three alternatives, using the field code “SUBJAREA”, where there are represented the 27 main thematic areas:

Reference managers

One of the aspects that are a pain in the neck for most of the investigators when elaborating their reports, articles, etc. is the management of bibliographical references, especially in those novice authors. However, this is a crucial labor that should accompany to the reading and if it is done correctly since the beginning it could avoid future problems.

The reference managers that emerge with the domain of technologies make it easier this task, by giving great advantages to the tedious work of storing the references, organizing and adapting them to the corresponding norms, which, in addition could vary from one publication to another, with the consequent effort of adapting them once the article is elaborated. Therefore, it is always recommended to select in advance the journal to which it is destined the article in order to avoid unexpected surprises; although we count with the support of a bibliographical manager.

Preprint / Postprint

A preprint is an original manuscript, commonly electronic, that an author published before or even after been reviewed by peers (or by other evaluation system), edited or designed for the publication for the editorial of an academic journal. In other words, a preprint is a document sent to an academic journal, but which has not reached the decision yet to be published, even though it could also be a document that has not been sent to any journal, published in a server of self-service. It is also important to comment, that preprints already existed since a long time ago, even before the apparition of Internet, since the end of the 50’s, they were printed and sent by e-mail to researchers and libraries, long time before peers reviewed them and published in a magazine.

Keywords

The key words form, together with the title and the abstract the metadata of an article, and constitute therefore the “Presentation card” of a scientific publication.

The author of a scientific article should aggravate his or her senses and research competences to get right to the time to select the terms that best describe the themes of their work and over all, the particularity of its contribution. In this sense, the selection of key words should be done in a reflexive and deliberated way, by thinking in the reader of the work, because they define the content of the article. This aspect is rather important if we want that our article could be found by other researchers in our knowledge area, because in this way we ensure its diffusions and of course, its impact in the scientific community.

Scientific social networks: Academia.edu

See Scientific Social networks part 1: Research Gate

Academia.edu is a social network that begins on September 2008 as an space for the researchers to share their works and in that way maximize their visibility at the same time making it possible the access to statistics of downloads and readings with graphics and maps that allow to know deeply the interests and impacts that have generated the published scientific works.

For the beginnings of 2017 this social network got together 36 millions of registered users, despite of the fact that the number of published texts do not get to 10 millions yet. Without doubt, this converts to Academia.edu in the scientific social network with higher traffic- finding it in the position 654 in the ranking Alexa-, although it could also be inferred for the difference of members- product that not all the users are “active”, that many of this counts belong to students or casual readers or that many users do not publish their works in the platform.

Promotion of research in social networks

In the XXI century the publication of academic and scientific work must be accompanied by a strategy of diffusion intended and scheduled, passing through the promotion of research in social networks. This new need arises associated with the concept of media convergence defined by Henry Jenkins as the flow of content across multiple media platforms, transformed later on in digital convergence: access to knowledge and information in real time from anywhere, across multiple devices connected to Web 2.0.

This context affects to researchers in the way that it gives the possibility to diffuse their research to any place in our planet in only minutes, by offering a diffusion of great reach and impact with a relative effort. Maximizing the rate of their work and showing up his name as investigators will result so easy as using properly the social and academic networks.

The exploitation of this networks as a diffusion strategy of the research offers to the researcher three fundamental elements in their professional development.

Impact factor, a scientific indicator to measure scientific journals

The Impact Factor is a Bibliometric Indicator devised by Eugene Garfield in 1955 (Garfield, 1955) in order to assess quantitatively and annually the contribution as a set that makes a magazine to the science. To do this, the magazine takes into account citations received by the set of articles, understanding that cites are a direct proof of the scientific contribution of the works.

The Impact Factor is calculated with an easy and intuitive formula; to calculate the Impact Factor of a journal in a given year (e.g. 2017), it is counted the number of cites that the magazine receives in 2017 for the articles published in its two previous years and are relativized among the number of papers that have been published in those two years.