Hey everyone, I have three papers in a middle-ranking journal.. its fair to say its top ten in my field but probably in the bottom half of the ten. I'm thinking three papers in the same journal may not mean much and am considering publishing others in a different journal so as to look more credible. What do you think? Has anyone send two papers at the same time to one journal?

I'm desperate to publish widely before my viva inorder to look a bit credible as I do not enjoy talking about my work. Or maybe am not so good at talking about it. I don't know.

Another reason for publishing is so that parts of it don't get out of date as my field is constantly changing. However, I don't want to waste time on this as am writing up and plan to spend a weekend only splitting a chapter for publication.

Your thoughts?

Unless the two papers form a kind of extension to each other, or are 2 parts in a "series", I would not submit two papers to the same journal at the same time. Also, unless you are super confident that both your papers will be accepted, you kind of increase the probability of having at least one of your papers rejected (you are your own competition as it were). I understand that you want to get your results "out there", but at the same time it is important that the submitted manuscripts are coherent and "look good", otherwise they are less likely to go all the way to publication (I suppose you already know from your previous paper publications how time consuming that can be - more than a weekend to prepare a MS?!).

Hi Jojo

I think you're right to want to get your work in as many different journals as possible - it shows your work will have been widely accepted by a range of academics, rather than the same few who are on the editorial committees etc of just one. And I also wouldn't send 2 articles in to one journal either - even if they liked both of them, they wouldn't publish both articles in the same edition, which means you'd be waiting ages for the second one to come out. Spread them around. And if you can write an article in a w'end, that's amazing!! Has taken me weeks and weeks to write one, and am still rewriting.

Poppy - in my field, publishing doesn't take that long, especially if you have already written your existing work to a high standard.

the bit about competing with myself is interesting. will think on it, as well as the possibility of two papers following on from one - maybe have a part 1 and part 2.

thanks. ultimately, i think its best to diversify. thanks for your thoughts.

Hey! I have been advised to shoot for different journals with my PhD papers, just to show that your work is of interest to a broad readership really. The other thing is, a lot of people try to publish to journals where their supervisors or someone in the department happens to be an editor, so it might look a little strange/suspicious if you have all of your publications in the same journal, even if it is perfectly innocent! I guess when you have loads of publications in different journals then it matters less if you already have stuff published in that journal, but for the first few I would try to spread them around a bit. Although having said that, my supervisor did get two articles published side by side in one journal once, but they were kind of linked, so I guess that's different! Good luck! KB