Contributions Writing Your Way into High Impact Factor Journals Brady Neiles, Charleve S. Carey, Alessandra Araujo, David Burkhart, Lucas J. Kirschman, Brandon LaBumbard, Seth LaGrange, Josiah J. Maine, Artur M. Rombenso, Michelle N. Wood, and Justin G. Boyles (corresponding author: jgboyles@siu.edu) Department of Zoology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 62901 For better or worse, “publish or perish” has become a driving ethos in academic research. Search committees, tenure committees, and administrators evaluate researchers on both quantity and quality of papers they publish. However, proliferation of journals has led to numerous possible publication outlets, even in relatively narrow subdisciplines, so those evaluating researchers often rely on metrics of journal quality as a proxy for quality of research. Because Impact Factor (IF; Thompson Scientiic) purportedly distills a complicated and nuanced judgment into a simple number, it has become the most widely used metric for this purpose (Seglen 1997). In theory, IF should relate to quality of research a journal publishes (Saha et al. 2003), but this assumption has been strongly questioned (Alberts 2013, Eyre-Walker and Stoletzki 2013). This suggests aspects other than scientiic quality are important in determining the journal in which a paper is ultimately published. In a ield as competitive as academic research, it is imperative for young researchers and students to maximize both the quantity and quality of their research output. As many of us do not have famous advisors, live in developed countries, or work in model systems (all of which might help publication in high IF journals), it is important that we maximize our chances of publishing in “good” journals. In this cut-throat environment, authors need their manuscripts to stand out, which may be effectively achieved through writing style. Strong scientiic writing involves a certain level of “salesmanship” and “storytelling.” To be successful, authors must ind a balance between creatively telling their story and articulating the signiicance of their indings (Day and Gastel 2012). Students are taught that small differences in writing style, emphasis, and presentation can inluence the quality of journal that will accept a manuscript. Is this simply perception among seasoned scientiic authors, or do differences really exist in presentation of papers in different-sized journals? If real differences do exist, it suggests (1) IF may be related to things other than scientiic quality, and (2) authors may be able to take advantage of some relatively simple writing techniques to improve the chances of getting their papers in journals with higher IFs. We collected data on a suite of characteristics from 12 papers in each of 10 journals (Table 1). We irst converted all articles from Portable Document Format (.pdf) to Word Microsoft Ofice Open XML Document Format (.docx) using Microsoft Word® 2013 (Microsoft, Redmond, Washington). We organized each document to a standard format, and removed headers, author afiliations, keywords, graphics and captions, and tables that would interfere with text segmentation. We assessed over 30 writing parameters broadly categorized as syntax, use of igures, and proportional lengths of sections (Table 2). Each variable was collected from all papers by one author to ensure consistency. We selected 10 journals with heavy ecology emphasis representing a wide range of IFs (Table 1; 2011 IFs: 0.619 to 17.557) and then selected 12 articles published in 2013 from each journal using a random 312 Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 96(2)