1 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality Part I: What To Publish and Where To Publish It cHAPteR 1 essential Ingredients for a successful Academic or scientific Article Preparing an article for publication in an academic or scientific journal can feel rather like balancing on a tightrope – a tightrope intricately woven of many finely crafted strands. The strands must be sound and enduring, much like the material that goes into the making of a good paper: the research, methods, theories, experiments, analyses and conclusions that are woven together into an academic or scientific article. The tightrope itself is rather like the argument of the paper. Vulnerable spots created by weak materials or poor weaving can bring down both the rope and the rope walker, much as weak evidence and a poorly constructed argument can fail to convince (or even interest) a reader and ultimately produce an effect very different from what the author had anticipated. Guiding readers successfully along the intellectual paths and scientific discoveries that have proven so fascinating and eminently publishable is the goal of every scholarly writer, and no author wants the attention of the reader to slip away. No academic or scientific writer wants to jeopardise his or her professional reputation either, and balancing on that tightrope is an apt analogy for the challenges of producing truly valuable scholarly work at the rapid pace demanded by the publish-or- perish environment of a modern digital world. PARt I: wHAt to PUBlIsH And wHeRe to PUBlIsH It