18 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality PARt I: wHAt to PUBlIsH And wHeRe to PUBlIsH It no matter how publishable and valuable they may be, and a larger number of review articles which tend to be cited more often than research reports. Some journals even use a policy of coercive citation, a practice in which a journal editor forces an author to add spurious citations of articles published by the journal and thus increase the journal’s impact factor before agreeing to publish his or her paper. Such unethical practices suggest that competition for top ratings among academic and scientific journals is as fierce as that for publication in them among academic authors, but the best way in which journals can truly improve their ratings and academics and scientists can have a significant impact through their writing is by maintaining a close focus on scholarship that is as honest as it is accomplished. 2.2 shaping Your work to Fit the Journal Producing honest and accomplished scholarship does not mean that you can’t stack the deck in your favour, however, when submitting your writing to the journal you’ve chosen. In fact, you should use everything you can learn about the journal to your advantage, and one of the classic ways of making your paper a good fit for a journal is to read and cite articles already published in that journal. If you’ve done your research by reading articles published in the journal that are similar to your own in order to choose the journal in the first place, this will prove easy and a natural progression of your scholarship that really does make your work compatible with other papers in the journal. The way in which you introduce your work to the journal’s editor is vital as well. You need to understand what the journal is looking for and then explain to the editor exactly why your paper fits the bill.