Knowing the best way of structuring your paper when writing it, and the best journal to send it to, helps your paper be accepted. Also knowing how publishers and editors think, and knowing how the peer review process works, is invaluable for gaining insight into the publishing process.

Understanding these things will help you write your papers in a way that they are much more likely to be accepted. And of course the more papers you get accepted, the better your career will progress!

Anthony Newman is one of the two Publishers of Elsevier’s Biotechnology portfolio of journals and is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He joined Elsevier 23 years ago and has been  publisher for the last 10 years. Before that he was the marketing communications manager for the biochemistry journals of Elsevier.  By training he is a polymer chemist and was active in a paint research lab. before leaving London and moving to Amsterdam in 1987 to join Elsevier.