Hi everyone! It's a little while since I've been on here but I could really use some advice.
I'm a 1st year PhD student but on a four-year programme so already done my MRes and started my research then. I've just had a paper accepted which will be published later this year and i found that whole process fairly straightforward. Mainly because the lab where I'm based focuses towards that venue every year as it's a good fit for the type of work the lab as a whole does.

My question is how do you find other venues to publish in? Or when a call for papers comes through, how do you know whether it is a good or bad thing to submit to? And if you do want to submit, do you always have a clear idea of a paper in mind or is it something you develop? And how do you know what a 'good idea for a paper' is? I'm really struggling to get my head around it all and I'm now getting all up in my own head about it all!

My supervisors do provide advice to a certain extent but they rarely give a straight answer! This has all come up after I recently found myself in an awkward situation about to submit with two other people which I wasn't sure about and had to find a way out!

Hope all of that makes sense! Any advice is appreciated!

To be honest I am a bit confused about what you are talking about here. I may be misreading but you appear to be confusing "paper" with "journal" sometimes and I don't know what you mean by "venue" either.

Can you clarify? Do you have a paper which you want to submit somewhere?

I've ignored all calls for papers so far as they have all been for random journals so I think they are a waste of time. I look at their impact factor, whether I've ever read anything else from there, who else is publishing in there etc

I took the approach of: do most of the PhD, collect and analyse the data and then see what papers can be written from it. Then I wrote a couple of reviews with other PhD students and with my supervisor - they had the ideas though and I just collaborated with them or wrote the papers based on their ideas.

I've had other PhD students ask me to write stuff with them but I've declined, mainly because they are targeting areas that I feel are outside of my research zone and it will look odd on my CV. Plus they will be in very low IF journals.

pm133 - okay, so I probably am confused. I get a lot of calls for papers from both journals and conferences. Journals are a little easier to think about as I know a lot of the ones that are relevant to my field. But for conferences, I'm less clear.

I don't have a paper to submit at the moment. But we are encouraged to apply to conferences and journals throughout our PhD and I'm trying to work out how to figure out how to find the correct places... Does that make more sense?

TreeofLife - Thanks for the advice. I was recently approached to submit a paper with collaborators and that's what prompted me to think about this kind of thing. My gut instinct was that it wasn't right for my work. But it was that situation that got me thinking. We're encouraged to publish throughout our PhD but I'm just not sure how to go about finding the right places to be looking for opportunities.

I think the idea is to publish your research... very few students in my field publish until at least their third year. For conferences you can just present a poster about your current research, you don't need many results, but for papers you need something decent to report. I certainly wouldn't worry about it yet.

Yeah that makes sense now thanks.
I would personally ignore all of these requests and focus on my research.
Only once I have something complete would I be interested in presenting it.
I know others disagree with that approach but I like to keep my focus during my PhD.
Perhaps if I postdoc I will soften my attitude on that.

I never got to grips with publishing and visiting conferences, I'm afraid to say. And now I should focus on completing my dissertation. I've attended two academic conferences, I presented a paper in each (first was based on my own project, from which I developed the idea for the dissertation, second was about an RA research project unrelated to my dissertation). I haven't published elsewhere.

One reason for this situation is that while I was technically an RA for the university for years, I worked at a private research facility affiliated with the university, thus results were proprietary and couldn't be published. So, even though I have years of practical research experience in my field, I don't have almost any publications to prove it (if someone is after such proof).