Competition is fierce for placement in leading journals of science and engineering, such as Nature and IEEE Communications Magazine. Inclusion in an issue of one of these publications earns the author(s) notoriety, prestige, and some measure of clout, which they can use to make sound legitimate outrageous claims that they might introduce while entertaining guests at a cocktail party. Based on the issues of technical journals I’ve read and due to my total lack of motivation to ever write a technical paper, I’ve compiled a short list of tips for anyone interested in being published to consider. Each tip is paired with an actual sample of published material exemplifying its use.

1. Title – a good title is of paramount importance in ensuring that your paper is read at least once during the initial screening process. Keep in mind that editors are flooded with more submissions in a year than all the trees on earth could produce paper for, which is a curious impossibility deserving of its own technical paper. The characteristics of a good title are counterintuitive and might strike you as being the opposite of what you would expect. The best titles keep the article’s topic quite ambiguous and/or are collections of unlikely word combinations that find themselves linked thanks to multiple abstraction layers. Your title should also feel a couple words too long when read, and should require more than one reading to appreciate all possible interpretations.

2. Illustrations – I am not referring here to graphs or other figures supporting the text. I’m referring to illustrations used for the express purpose of drawing interest to your paper. While inclusion of bits of artwork throughout an article’s length is a matter of author preference, simple illustrations on the title page are obligatory.

Editors themselves are most often responsible for this aspect of the paper, but I include this tip with the rationale that an author taking the illustration responsibility upon themselves couldn’t hurt their chances of being published.

As to what should be depicted in the artwork, it should make only vague reference to your paper’s topic. Ideally, the appropriateness of your artwork will border on being darkly witty and uncomfortably nonsensical. For example, if your paper is a comparison between two modes of transmitting data, one mode faster than the other, your title page artwork might depict a rabbit and turtle in the desert on an interstate highway void of cars. The use of simple artwork communicates to the reader that the article is strong enough to stand on its own without depending on fancy artwork to justify its being published. Rather than submit text only, which might suggest you are unaware that artwork can be used to counteract a lack of substance, text plus simple artwork is the equivalent of saying “Yeah, I’m aware some people try to increase their odds by including fancy title page graphics, but as you can see, my article doesn’t need that assistance.”

A rule of thumb regarding the complexity of the illustrations is that they should be no more graphically intricate than the entries in the clip art library of microsoft powerpoint. One popular choice is to pick a rendition of a 3D object that is drawn in such a way that no attempt has been made to create the illusion of depth.

3. Flaunt your foreignness – your analytical genious [sic] will be evidenced by the inclusion of choice grammatical errors only a non-native English speaker could make. While most people deplore the use of stereotypes, few are able to make judgments totally independent of them. When your objective is publication in a technical journal, it’s obvious how taking advantage of this handout could be your catalyst. Another angle of argument: dedicated and publish-worthy researchers don’t have time for petty language considerations when all their work is governed by mathematics.