FastTrack Live Workshop #39 | Is Your Topic Actually Publishable?

You might have a research idea.
You might even have a “gap.”

But is it actually publishable?

In this live workshop, we’ll walk through:

• How to use the PICO-D-T model to sharpen and stress-test your research question
• How to identify your conceptual nearest neighbours (and why they matter for journal fit)
• Practical tools to help you validate the publishability of your paper before you waste months going down the wrong path

We’ll look at real examples and break down what separates a strong, journal-ready topic from one that will likely be desk rejected.

If you want feedback on your idea, submit your topic or specific question in advance (or bring it live). We’ll review selected submissions during the session. Submit yours with the link below 👇
https://forms.gle/gp9cceQfWrXXWcXb6

💡 Publish Fast *Guaranteed*: Apply to work 1:1 with Prof Stuckler: https://www.stucklerconsulting.com/consultation/?el=podcast

🚀 Get our FREE workshop on how researchers publish in high-impact journals in under 90 days! https://www.stucklerconsulting.com/training/?el=podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Before you finish your draft, before you ever write the cover letter and load everything up to click submit at the journal and just hope and pray for the best, you need to have answered a critical question. Is your paper actually publishable? And and by that I mean it's not, is my paper good? Is it decent? Did I work hard on it? Did my supervisor like it and say it's great, best things in sliced bread? But you need to know: does your paper have the critical and necessary ingredients that tick that box, that make the grade into something publishable that independent reviewers out there are gonna say passes the bar? And to help you do that, by the end of this session, I'm gonna leave you a publishability equation and with a five-question test that you can use today on your manuscript or even your topic idea to help you know if it's publishable. And if you can answer yes to all five of these criteria, you're gonna be ready to submit. And if not, it's gonna help you know exactly what you need to do to fix it and make it publishable. If you're new to this channel, I'm Professor David Stuckler, and this is Fast Track. Uh, we are a fast but growing community of people all over the world, and what I aim to provide on this channel is the support that I wish I would have had when I was just starting out. Flash forward, I've been a professor at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, and I've had the great benefit of fantastic mentors along the way and pass that knowledge down to my students over the years at those lead institutions. And now I want to make that implicit logic open access and available to all and give you the same insight that I shared with those students over the year, many who themselves have gone on to become tenured professors. So, with that, uh let's dive in. As always, we start with our quick tip of the week. And today it's define your community. And I think, you know, times have changed for PhDs, and especially after COVID. Things are much more online, dispersed, international. Um, I remember when I was doing my PhD back in the day at Cambridge, we had a true cohort effect that we had researchers sitting, literally sitting alongside each other, working together, helping each other. And today that feels rarer, and many of the researchers I talk to feel like they're working in isolation, are working all on their own to figure things out. So I encourage you to find a community. Um, there is that African proverb if if if you uh you know want to go far, um, go together. And if you want to go fast, go alone. So, but you want to go far. It says, and research is a long game. So find your community. It could be through our communities, could be through your university, uh, could be elsewhere, through other programs, but I really encourage you to find that tribe so you are plugged into a rich network in your field. And and believe me, times get hard in PhD, it helps to have people in your network you can count on. So, with that, I just want to also uh give a welcome. If some of you are watching on Team Replay, uh definitely hit like. It helps the algorithm to reach other people who might just need to hear this message today. Uh, it really helps our community to grow. And um let me know if you're on team replay. Just comment replay. I read and reply to every comment on the channel. And we'll have some time as ever for questions at the end of the session. So uh let me dive in. I'm gonna pull up a whiteboard as I like to do because I find a lot of you here are quite visual. Um, some of you are listening in the car or are on the drive to work, like a podcast. So I'll also explain the logic so you you don't need the visual. Um, but okay, let's go let's start. What are the uh five essential ingredients that a publishable paper will have? And let me share my screen uh to go ahead and do this. Hope you guys can all see this. I I think of this formula we like to make things kind of simple, but I like to think of publishability as a function of a few main ingredients. One is the gap, one is gonna be the value of your paper, one is gonna be its um is gonna be its alignment, and I'll explain that in a minute. Another is gonna be its clarity, and the fifth part of your your equation here is gonna be the fit, um, specifically with journals you're looking at. I'm gonna go through each of these ingredients here in a second. But you can think of this like multiplication, because in a way, if uh you know the value of your gap is zero, or the potential value add to the field is zero, or the fit is zero, well, you can have all the others in place, but you multiply by zero and your publishability is going to be zero. So you have to have all of these, and again, it's multiplicative. So um if you you right have a very weak gap, you can have you know other things. You can have like a very clear paper, great fit with the journal, but if the the gap is just very small, um you're gonna have low publishability. Um, so that that's why these are indispensable uh ingredients for your paper. And uh let me know if you guys are struggling with any of these as I go through them. But uh again, by the end I'll give you a five-question test that you can go through. So let's go through through the first. And this is something we do spend a lot of time on on this channel, is to understand, well, do you have a real gap? Let's let's go through the first one. Do you have a real gap? And and sometimes I see people come with a very amorphous gap that's just weakly defined. It's like, well, there's just there's just not not enough research. Well that's kind of there, but you need a specific gap. What's missing? What's that that missingness in the field? Almost like you've taken your your reader right to the edge of knowledge and said, this is where the cliff drops off, and we wanna, you know, the the cliff is here, we want to build a bridge and get over there. Um, that we need to take them to that gap. And so that can be could be a missing population, uh, could be uh a missing time frame, could be a methodological weakness, could be uh a conflicting theory or contradictory evidence or not knowing enough about certain mechanisms. But you should be able to articulate your gap very cleanly. Uh, reviewers and editors both need to see that. And if they don't see that, you're gonna fall prey to one of the most common reasons uh for rejection, one of the biggest threats to publishability, it is that they they they don't see they don't see novelty. And this is gonna bring us to the next point that we have. So I want to make sure that you guys have this clarity about a gap. Now, one thing to say too is that gaps have different values, not all gaps are the same. So I see researchers sometimes say, well, I can see, right, um say I mentioned a missing population, this research hasn't been done in Ethiopia before, or this research hasn't been done in Canada. And um, well, sometimes that that that can be valuable for the Canadians, it can be valuable for the Ethiopians, but just then showing something we already knew, say in the US or in India in those populations, might not be big international value for publishability in big American journals, for example. It might be valuable for publishing in, say, the Ethiopian journal of something or other, but you have to think about that. That some gaps are inherently gonna have more value than others. And I really like to steer you in kind of an early career stage. You know, if you want to aim for Q1 papers, you need to have Q1 level gaps. That's gonna be uh uh, you know, you need to be kind of Q1 level in all of these areas. So when you're looking at it to make sure you have a real specific, well-defined gap, you also need to make sure that this is this is something meaningful. And sometimes I think for researchers just starting out, that that's hard to define. Um, is this meaningful? Is this valuable? Um, there's some ways that you can start to see that, and I'm I'm gonna share that uh in a second. Because that takes me to the second point that you've got to get to. So, okay, you got a real gap, but now do you have clear value add in your paper? Defining gap's good, but you also kind of it's you also have to be able to deliver on that and be able to fill that gap. Say something's missing, well I'm good, but you can your your research needs to come directly in contact with that gap. So that clear value add is, I mean, your paper has to change what we know about that gap. And so if you're imagine if your paper just was gone tomorrow and never existed, uh would would we have lost some valuable knowledge? So your your clear value add could be all sorts of things. It could be maybe you have um right in terms of that gap, the the clean example before would be well, we're gonna add in it hasn't been studied in Ethiopia or Canada, so that's gonna be the value that I fulfill. But there are other ways you can do this. You might have a uh more up-to-date analysis, you might have a stronger synthesis, you might use a new conceptual lens or new methods to shed light. Um, there can be all sorts of uh value add, but you you need to be able to articulate, you need to be able to articulate your contribution and novelty here in relation to that gap. And if you cover these two, you've really gone a long way towards optimizing your publishability formula. Now, how can you really see? We've got a little uh trick to help you see, right, the that these two components of the equation is this meaningful, is this important to the academic literature? And and we do that through forecasting your impact. So we like here to forecast your impact. And I commonly say, there's a stat that gives me nightmares, that the median citations of uh of research papers in in the first two years uh of their publication, median number of citations is zero. And I don't think you guys want to. Sometimes you think, well, oh, I published, that's well I'm good. Yeah, well, you want to do more than publish. I mean, many of you are doing this because you want to do something important and meaningful, not just pad your CV. Um, so it it it behooves you to take some time to ensure that what you're doing is gonna have impact. The easiest way to do this is to go look for something that we call a conceptual nearest neighbor paper. And that is the paper that is most similar to yours in the field. And that is often, anyway, going to be a benchmark for your gap.

unknown 10:40

Right?

SPEAKER_00 10:40

To know there's a gap, you took us to the edge of knowledge. So you're gonna be able to take us right to a paper similar to yours and say, well, that's the point where knowledge drops off. Now, when I say about forecasting your impact is simply go into Google Scholar, look at those papers, and you get a sense of the citations. If you got citations that are getting zero citations, well, guess what? Your paper's probably gonna get zero citations too. Um, so the best correlate of your paper's impact and and value that you can infer from these two components of your publishability equation is going to be from the performance of similar papers. Is that a perfect correlation? No. Are there exceptions? Yes. But this is an objective indicator that will help give you guidance if you feel unsure. Alright. Hey guys, any questions? Do do pop in the uh do pop in uh the chat here. Uh ask, ask, yeah, Tom says, hey prof, hey everybody, good to see you. Um tal says, hey prof, how are you? Hey Tal, good to see you again as ever. Edo says, I'm skeptical about this page. Edo, yeah, well, let me know what you're skeptical about, because sometimes that can mean I haven't done a a clear enough job of explaining things. So do let me know. If you're confused about something or something's not clear, that means it might not be clear to somebody else. So uh let us know. I really I like those tough, challenging kinds of questions. Uh, we have India Country4569 for latest research in any field, kindly suggest websites. Yeah, um using these kind of tests along the way here, I just recommend good old-fashioned Google Scholar. I see people racking up AI tools and sometimes racking up all these dis fancy AI tech stack, all these gizmos. It's a sophisticated way of just avoiding doing the thing that you need to do. So uh yeah, I think keep it the research is already complicated enough. Um, you can keep things simple here. Let's go to the next part of the publishability equation. And this is alignment. Um, and this alignment is really important, is that you now need a method uh that actually answers your research question. And I'm just gonna abbreviate RQ for research question here. Um and and this this is kind of critical, right? If you haven't right, sometimes people will just say, well, there's this gap, and I just happen to have this data, or well, I just like using this method because that's what I always use. Well, it it needs to deliver on your research question and and your gap and deliver that value. And so sometimes I actually do see misalignment in in papers. Um, right, so your method should really flow quite logically and line up uh with with what you're aiming to deliver on. Um so that believe me, you look at your paper, make sure that these two are syncing up. Because I do sometimes see things promised in the introduction of a paper that that paper can't actually deliver. And if you've done that, you have defeated your publishability. Um move to the next example. The next one that follows uh around this is around clarity. And this is always the case. I mean, you have it can have the best results, best findings, but if the reviewers don't get it, uh your paper's not gonna be publishable. And I think a lot of uh rookies or beginners fall into this and they get very frustrated when the reviewers say, come back and ask for things that were actually in the paper. I used to get very upset about that and think, oh, these dumb reviewers, and you have all these reviewer 2 memes out there for that reason. But over time, you know, there are some curmudgeon-like reviewers out there, they're gonna be difficult. But over time you realize, you know, maybe I could have been clearer about that. Maybe I could have made it easier. So I always want you to have sympathy with your readers and reviewers to make things so clear, so blindingly obvious, they can't miss it, even if they're dumb. Um, that's what you want to aspire to. So you want to make sure that that you've got clarity and that these elements of your gap, your value add, your methods alignment are showing.

unknown 14:56

Right?

SPEAKER_00 14:56

They can be in there, but if they're tucked in there in ways that the the readers can't see very quickly and easily, um, you're gonna get rejected, either desk rejected or or later on when the reviewers can't make heads of tail or tails out of your paper. Um, so this is um really important, especially in the clarity. You really need to make sure this it comes out in your results section and your abstract as well. I really want to see here that your results and abstract line up, and it's really key. The abstract is supposed to be this mini snapshot of your whole paper, and you'd be amazed how many papers I see where this introduction of the abstract or the background of the abstract doesn't line up with the introduction of the paper. Or the abstract highlights things in the results, which is not actually the highlight reel of the results. Um, so there should be this synchronization happening. If the if those are out of sync, um you've undermined your clarity and you've weakened your publishability. So at the minimum, I want to see that your results and your abstract are really lining up here. Um so with that, that's uh that's clarity. Um let's go to our last criterion in our publishability formula, and that's the journal's fit. This is this is uh another top reason for rejection, is it's just outside of the scope of the journal. All right, your editor's asking two questions when they're looking at your paper. Um and one is you know, is this of interest to our readers? Is right, is this something that fits with our journal? We we have limited resources, could be a fantastic paper, but maybe needs to go somewhere else. So, yeah, your publishability is going to be zero if it doesn't fit the journal you're submitting to. So, again, there's a whole process we go through to help you find and optimize your journal so that your cover letter, your introduction, um, even some of your citations are lined up for where you want to publish. Um, it's an important step that a lot of people just gloss over. Um, so you need to get that journal fit. And the other thing the editors are, of course, looking for is in the other steps. Is there clear value add? Do the methods line up? Is it sound? Are there important results going on here? Is it clear? And I can follow it quite quickly. But um, this journal fit. If you you don't have fit, you're dead on arrival. And so I hope you can see again in our five-part formula here, these are all five things that you have to nail. And uh, if you you guys have struggled with some desk rejects, or even have struggled with um getting some reviews uh that were harsh, um, see if you can see where that you might have had some weakness in these areas. It's gonna help you diagnose what you can do. And this is where I want to get to your final checklist of of what you can do uh yourself today going forward here. So um here's our five-part uh final checklist that you guys can implement today. Um so one, I want to say, can you state your research gap in one sentence? That is the level of clarity I want you to have. Similarly, and this should be linked. Can you explain the value add of your paper? I mean its contribution, also in one sentence. Simple English, right? This is an exercise just for you, it should go in your paper, but it's a diagnostic, it should be there. Three. Do your methods directly answer your paper's main research question or aim or or hypothesis or different fields will set this up differently. Um again, I know for some of you be like, well, that's obvious. Take a hard look. I see this out of sync all the time. Finally. The really important novelty and power of your paper, plus the plus a gap and and value add, um, are merging very clearly. Like easy to spot. I don't want you to have to like dig and comb through the paper to find this stuff. I want it to be blindingly obvious. Assume they're dumb so they can see it. Then, point five, can you clearly explain why this paper belongs in your target journal? Can you do that? Do you have some evidence for why your paper is a fit? Not just I think this journal looks good, it has a nice title. Evidence. They published similar papers on this just last year. They've got an ongoing debate in this journal. The editor has a call for papers on this topic. If you answered no, and be honest with yourself, answer no to any of these, you know what you gotta do. And uh that clarity is is power. So um let me know, guys. Um let me know if uh you passed this publishability formula for your papers, if you struggled with any of these things on your own, and and just remember that sometimes I think there is this view that, well, it you know, the value of my paper is the hard work that went into it. And unfortunately, the irony is there's not necessarily a direct link between more blood, sweat, and peers, blood, sweat, and tears in a better paper. I've believe it or not, written a paper, um, the fastest paper I've written, that later got published in The Lancet, and I was able to do that paper start to finish in less than a week. It had very high publishability metrics, um, and right there's just not that direct correlation necessarily between hard work in or more sophistication in and value out because a lot of your publishability formula is gonna depend on the strength of your gap, the strength of the value that you're adding. So a very powerful gap, very powerful gap. It could be something that's really, really important in the field. Nobody's gonna be able light on. Um, if you can do that very quickly, it's still gonna have huge publishability. If you can do that with clarity, you fit with the journals, have internal alignment in your paper, and and deliver the value. All right. Um, so guys, I'm gonna take some of your questions. Uh, and uh, we've got a little bit of time today. Uh, I had fewer submissions this week, guys. I want to encourage you all to take advantage of the session here. Submit your I've got a QR code on the screen. If you want to participate and get me to look at your video questions, look at your drafts, manuscripts, um, anything at all, this is your time that I've blocked off and dedicate every single week. So definitely click the QR and take part. And of course, I'll leave a link up here about our research communities. If you want to check out what we do, see if it resonates with you, um, have a look. It's uh you can have a uh a trial and give us a test drive and see if it works for you. All right, let me come back to our chat. Um, and so I've got AMA uh 19128. I would like to know if a method that's used in location A can be used for location B. So this seems to come back to this population gap question. Now, some population gaps, uh if I'm understanding you correctly, AMA, um reading between the lines, and yeah, that can be a kind of low-hanging fruit paper. To say, well, this approach hasn't been done in this population or this setting. Um, so I'm gonna replicate this method, but I do this extension uh in this new location. The better way to argue for the value is to say, well, why is this new location? Why is location B so interesting? What does that tell us that location A doesn't? Is there a reason to believe that we'd get a different result in location B? If you have that kind of argument, then it becomes a broader interest than just something that's going to be interesting only to the people in location B. Um, otherwise it can look like it's marginal or small value, just kind of derivative, just a minor extension of what's out there. And that's okay. I mean, science does kind of build up brick by brick, and only every now and then you have a big punctuated break in how science evolves. And so that that's not necessarily a bad thing, but uh it will shape the value of your gap. Um, so I hope that answers your question. Let me know if I got that right. I'm interpreting through short text messages, so sometimes I do miss things. Um, and let me ask, uh, here we've got Reverend David uh Laliekal. Hey, good to have you join us today. Says, I'm writing on indigenization of military music in Kenya. I'm having a problem accessing papers related to this topic. Okay, well, um, interesting. That's a uh uh I encourage you. You when you say you may you're having trouble accessing papers on this topic, I wonder if it's your topic so narrow there just aren't any papers written on it. Because you I mean, I cannot imagine there are there's a lot of ink spilled about indigenization of military music in Kenya. Heck, I don't even know that there's a lot of research papers on military music in Kenya. So you're kind of shrinking your space with each of these variables, like the parameters on your topic. Kenya, got a University of Kenya. Now I'm gonna look and look at the part that's about music, now I'm gonna look at the part that's military music, and now indigenization of the music. I mean, so I'm my suspicion is I thought when I saw this, you said I'm having trouble accessing papers, it's just that maybe you couldn't access because you needed open access journals or something. Uh uh, but now that I think about it for 10 seconds, I think your topic's way too narrow. So, um, and this I commonly see when our correct model, we often talk about um, and if you're new in research, I'm gonna guess that you're new in research. Um, sorry if I'm offending you, but I'm just gonna assume you're new in research. Um, sometimes the way people will start is with lit review, and they sometimes you've got to think about the lit review as a funnel, a strategic funnel that's gonna make an argument for your study. Well, what happens is you want to be down here and you want to say that maybe you want to do something about indigenization uh of military music in Kenya. Well, if you're gonna derive that from your lit review, that's what your lit review is gonna do and distill and spit out, you need to go broader when you do your lit review and try to access papers as as you described it. So here you gotta go broader, and you might need to look at um indigenization of music in those debates, and then you need to look at uh what what are kind of maybe debates in military music, and you need to think about the stops along the way. Um, and then maybe you need to get into kind of sub-Saharan Africa or or African countries generally or developing countries. I don't know exactly what the stops are gonna be along the way, uh, where you're gonna start uh your debate. Maybe you want to start, you could there's no right or wrong way here. Maybe you need to start with military music and the role that that's played, and then how there's indigenization processes, and then what's been looked at in African countries, and finally get this is the gap that that we have, and that's gonna roll out the red carpet for your future studies. Uh I hope that makes sense. I I suspect that's uh where you're at at the moment. I have um tools and business hack. 9841 says hi, hey, and then now goes hey, hey David, I just joined your program today. I've interested in biomedical tracking. How do I get the best three to five research topics I can submit from this area to my supervisor? Well, um, if you're in our program, I really uh encourage you to go through the finding a winning topic mini course. There's a great step-by-step uh guide and worksheet, and we've got our private workshops you can join to test it out. Um, you're gonna follow a two-phase approach. I actually covered some of that in the last live, but the internal training you've got is even better. And um just go step-by-step through that worksheet. Um, and and then take what you come up with, your ideas, to our workshops. It's gonna force you to run a model to make sure it's clear, well-defined. It's gonna force you to define your conceptual nearest neighbor paper. It's actually gonna use it built in, um, it's gonna ensure you satisfy publishability criteria before you go down a dead end. So um definitely check that out. It's uh it's step by step, so you can't go wrong, even if you're doing this for the first time. Um okay. Uh we've got uh and AMA says yes to an earlier point. Okay, cool. That sounds like I answered your question about location A to location B. We've got Bungie, double O1. Uh uh Bungie or Bungie says, always start with literature review if it's your first time. If you have a solid idea in mind, um, oh I think you're trying to quote me back here. Um if you have a solid idea in mind, do you think I should go for a research idea instead? Secondly, how many authors do you recommend min max? Oh, this is a great question. This is a great question. Um so look, uh, you can skip straight to doing a research idea, just make sure you've def right if you think about the flow. If you do a lit review first, you will uncover gaps. So you've got clarity that you've got a good topic. If you skip the lit review, you just need to make sure you've done some kind of review, you know the field well enough that there's a gap there. So often, right, if I have a solid research idea, well, I've already done a bunch of lit reviews, I know my field intimately. So I don't need to do a lit review uh to help me harvest ideas. Um, because I already know them. I have a thriving research agenda and pipeline, but I've been doing this for 20 years. Um so if you have a good research idea, sometimes that can be handed to you by a supervisor. It still behooves you to ensure you've got the nuts and bolts in our publishability formula in place like you've got a solid gap. Um, and you've identified the value and forecast of the impact of what your study could do so you don't do a paper that is like a zero in one of those publishability formula components and is dead on arrival. I don't want that to happen to you. Um so have a think about that. The other consideration on research ideas is just check that it's feasible in a short period of time. And sometimes I see um people taking on projects that are vast, that are just too huge for the stage that you're at. I really encourage you guys strongly at early stages of your career to go for low-hanging fruit. Um, so uh you don't have to start with a literature review, just compensate it. And and in the paper itself, you will have a mini literature review, which is your introduction, which is still going to be a strategic argument for why your study needs to exist. Um, so thanks for asking that. The second part of your question, you said, how many authors do you recommend min-max? Well, the important thing is that you're the first author at this stage of your career. Um, later on, you will become the senior author, like like I've done, or in some fields you end up just alphabetizing the authors, depending on what you do. But um, I I tend to be quite liberal with co-authorship. I think you can get quid pro quos um in the sense that you bring somebody in your paper, they help improve your paper, and they like your paper, they're gonna have an incentive to bring you on their paper. That can uh multiply your publication output in early stages, and it can also link to the tip of the week, which is it embeds you in a community. You're no longer flying solo, and it can help you be more productive, it can help you spot things that are not clear in your paper. So I do like co-authors if they're meaningfully contributing. You want to leverage your co-authors effectively. So I like getting full professors, those who have more experience, to really help with the framing of the paper, the narrative, the story. Um, so use them in strategic points. You don't want to get your full professor kind of you know, uh helping you clean up, clean your data set or help you with kind of very rudimentary statistical code that you could have asked ChatGPT to help you with. Um getting ChatGPT to troubleshoot your statistical code, by the way, and certain other methodological steps is a very good use of AI. Um, so I hope that makes sense. So it's there's no hard and fast number. Um and I tend to be quite liberal with co-authorship and be inclusive to build my network early on in my career. And I actually that's persisted throughout my career. I've I've tended just my personal philosophy, though. Not everybody will agree with me. Uh okay, and we have Reverend David Lolly Eckel saying, uh thank you, Prof. David. This is my first time on your platform. Glad you picked my comment and responded. I hope to follow through if you uh you're very welcome. Uh hope it's helpful. Um, you know, Reverend David, I I hope uh you know, happy to look more. I hope that captured the spirit of your question and where you're at. I would definitely encourage you. It's a common mistake in the literature review, you need to go one level up, one level up in in broader. You need to go up the funnel so they have enough material to review. You can't review if there's no papers, there's nothing to review. Um so here we got a very good question. User GQ7 up 5HD9Z says, uh uh, I guess YouTube, does YouTube just assign names to you guys? I I don't know how this works on on the algorithm, but uh good to have you with us, user GQ7. Um and they say, based on five questions you discussed here, how can a systematic literature review or meta-analysis literature review paper be framed? Well, um, great question. So, same thing. You need to say, well, why do we need a systematic review on this topic? Or why do we need a meta-analysis on this topic? Let's say the so with a systematic review, you got two types. These these are lit reviews that are done on steroids, they're done in a systematic step-by-step way. That's why I recommend them as the very first paper, because it's kind of idiot-proof, it's great for beginners, they're also more publishable than traditional narrative lit reviews, and they're gonna deliver all the benefits to you of literature reviews, and it just end up being faster and easier to do. So, I'm a big advocate of these, and all my PhD students I've had, uh, Harvard Oxford and Cambridge, I've had start with these reviews. You can trace my students over the years, you will see I put my money where my mouth is, and that's what I've done. And it's just been a straightforward formula for success. So, okay, so okay, in the systematic literature review world, there is a qualitative synthesis and a quantitative synthesis, quantitative often being meta-analysis. So, for example, you could say we need an SLR with meta-analysis, because maybe that quantification hasn't been done before. Um, that would be a justification. I am for the first time we're doing a meta-analysis. You need that kind of characteristic of for the first time we're doing this. You need to say maybe there have been reviews on this, but not on my topic. Or maybe there's a lot of scattered findings out there, but there's been no review that's brought them together to figure out what the overall body of evidence is saying. So you still need to justify the same as any paper out there, what's the paper closest to yours? And in your case, you're looking your nearest neighbor paper, it's going to be another systematic review or another lit review. What's the paper closest to yours? What did they not do that needs to be done? That rolls out the red carpet and makes a case to justify the existence of your paper. That's what the editors are looking for. So um, yeah, user GQ7, does that help? Does that make sense? Um, if you want, add a follow-up question, and we can actually go look for that uh in your sniper paper to help you define that um in your introduction. But this is a critical part of your introduction, is probably gonna feature in your cover letter as well. Um, thanks for asking that. And my Nary, uh, you know, I don't get feedback in real time. You're laughing about something, so uh could have been I was just goofy or curamudgeon-like, but um uh yeah, uh I I've I've I've made small little professorism jokes along the way, so uh not sure. I may have lost you there. But um glad uh glad we can provide some amusements along the way. I think research is actually a lot of fun. Um and if you're not having fun while you're doing research, something has gone wrong. Uh I'm not exaggerating, right? You guys should be getting into research because you're passionate about it. That's not to say it's gonna be a hard grind. It's like, well, you know, I'm having fun at the gym, I'm lifting heavy weight, it's painful, it's hard, I'm grinding through it, but it's fun, makes you feel good. There's a joy of discovery in research. So um, you know, if you have if you have the steps in place and you know, where it's steps would be fun, being fun is if you feel like you're making no progress. Like imagine I stopped feeling very good if I went to the gym and I was lifting heavy and I didn't get any muscle, or I didn't feel good afterwards. Well, yeah, I'd get pretty frustrated and not want to go to the gym anymore. So um so I think sometimes when researchers are left on their own to figure things out and they spin in circles, and you know, you're gonna hit here you hit a landmine, here you hit another wall, here you hit another barrier. Well, yeah, then you're gonna get demoralized and frustrated and eventually feel powerless and want to throw in the towel. Um, so uh yeah. Oh, and user GQ7 says, Thank you, prop. Okay, cool. So hope uh got your question answered there. Um would love to hear what you find out. We've got uh Bungie or Bungie 001 is back. Thank you for the advice. An amazing video. Sometimes we know we're making a difference, but we forget. Just wanted to uh remind you that you definitely are. Oh, thank you. Well, this is why this is why I show up uh week after week after week. Uh this is why I take the time out um from being a professor to make these videos and and provide the support. And if there's something that you guys would like to see, um if something you'd like to see, let me know. And that's exactly what I respond to. Because there are definitely gaps out there in the way people are trained. And again, I know that so many of you come to me and say, I've just been told to figure this out. I'm smart, I'm capable. I mean, yeah, reason you don't have to be a genius to do research. You just need somebody to show you how to do it. You need feedback, you need structure, you need guidance. So um, yeah, definitely that uh, but thanks for showing up, Bungie. And Data IG, who's in in our community, says it's a lot of fun if you have guidance and support. Absolutely. And I know Data IG, you too, you've had a tough ride uh over the years, and uh we're in that kind of cluster of having to figure things out all on your own uh for a long time. And um having I I think really too, community makes things just so much more fun. Um and it's just it helps with discovery. You want to be able to bounce ideas off friends and colleagues, and yeah, probably notice on yourself how you get the best ideas sometimes in those moments where you're in the shower or you're going for a walk. Having that that sense of community um enables uh those kinds of connections also to to happen. Um, Miner is saying YouTube made up a cute name. Oh uh My Nary, I thought that was uh I just thought that was your name that you chose. Um okay, but yeah, definitely a cute name. Um so Tal says my new co-author fell in love with my capability to do a lightning speed SLR thanks to Prof. I think I've done five in the past two months. I mean, dang, Tal, that's impressive. Uh it it it is cool. I'm Matt, I I mean you can watch Tal Tal's a friend to a community, um, and you can see his story if you go on my channel, go to a playlist. There's actually Tal shared a story with others. It was really inspiring to me and others because remember, Tal, if you don't mind me sharing, um, you were about to throw in the towel and you you were gonna give up because you had a bunch of papers rejected, and you kind of flipped it very fast to being the go-to person in your department for SLRs. And yeah, once you crack the code and you see the hidden system in research, a lot of what you'll see I'm sharing on the channel. If this stuff resonates with you, encourage you to check out our systems. But once you see that, you can't unsee it, and it just unleashes a lot of productivity. And uh, yeah, Ty, you're an awesome example of that. That's very cool. You gotta share some of those with me. Um, I love celebrating with your successes, so um, but five in two months is I I'm not sure I could go that fast, honestly. Uh, I can go fast, but that's impressive. Um, Amma 19128, I've really understood, uh, and thank you. Um, okay, awesome. Thanks for that feedback, Amma. I uh like to make sure that um that is all clear. And just take a couple more here and we'll start wrapping up today. I'm doing my FYPRN currently literature review. Your videos helped a lot. I don't know what FYPRN, maybe is that registered nurse? Um, so yeah, I don't always know all your acronyms, and this is at Lila Kim V5S. Um, but pleased to hear it. Yeah, I I think, you know, somebody commented the other day, uh, wow, your lit review training from four years ago is still accurate. It's like, well, yeah, lit review is a lit review. It's the the process is kind of a century old, it hasn't changed. So um this this stuff is timeless. It is almost like uh the third rail that drives things forward that you don't always see. Um Tal says, I'd love to show these SLRs. Yeah, really. I am pretty busy. I'm pretty busy. You can uh submit them to our workshops. I'd love to take a look. And um uh yeah, Tal, and and my area you're saying final year project. Encourage you, yeah, submit that final year project. I'm gonna put the QR code one more time for you guys to submit stuff to the workshop I'll be doing next Friday. Um, I haven't decided the topic yet. We might do one on uh PhD by publication is one of the options I'm flirting with. Um but if you guys have a theme you'd like me to cover for the next workshop, uh do let me know. As ever we do invite guests as well onto the podcast. Um, we have Professor Martin McKee joining us, Professor Courtney McNamara, and I've got some special guests coming up as well, really excited to share with you, but I'm not gonna lift the lid on that just yet. Um but someone uh really, really prominent um in the field that's gonna have just really great insights for you. Um I'm not gonna say too much more, but um yeah, I will give you a hint. But someone similar in stature to the editor of The Lancet, um, to put it in perspective like that. Um okay, guys, that is a wrap. I hope you all have a fantastic weekend, and I will look forward to seeing you next week. Think about that publishability formula, be honest with yourself, let me know in the comments um how you stack.