Publish or Die

Many researchers meet this requirement. If you cannot publish your results, you are not considered a good researcher, which negatively influences both your position at your university (or your institute) and could make it more difficult to find the right collaborations and funds for future projects.

Every day, I receive offers to publish in (predatory) journals that I have never heard about, and most of them guarantee a speedy review and publishing (if I pay the fee to publish). Because of this huge number of bogus invitations, I sometimes overlook legitimate invitations from serious journals asking me to do a legitimate review. The result being that I end up not replying to a genuine offer that I should have agreed to do.

Most of our receiving editors have occasional trouble finding good and willing reviewers for our submitted papers. Maybe the big number of unserious offers is the reason, but my recommendation is to have an additional look at who is publishing the journal. If you want your paper to be published in a serious and ISI indexed journal, you also must expect to serve as a reviewer. I often say to my researchers that for every paper you submit, you should also say yes to at least two review offers.

In the Journal of Aquatic Food Product Technology, we usually require two reviewers for each paper. There are two types of referees that are frustrating to the editorial board. Firstly, the ones who do not reply to an invite; it is common courtesy to decline an offer if you are not suitable or not able to do a review. And secondly, maybe even worse, the ones who say yes to review a paper but never deliver the review. So, for all of you authors out there who want to publish your work in order to survive, you also should do your part of the job as a reviewer. And critically reviewing others works is also a good learning process that will help you write better papers yourself.