Common Manuscript Writing Mistakes Scopus Editors Detect

As far as manuscript wring is concerned, it could be dubbed both as a piece of artwork and a manifestation of science. While manuscripts do exist with the humankind since the ancient times of Egyptian, Greece and Indus civilizations, it discovered new dimensions with the development of civilization. During the old times the manuscripts generally conveyed handwritten documents consisting of papyrus sheets, palm leaves, treated birch barks and even parchment with fine vellum. Though the body of the manuscript presentation were different the soul purpose remained the same, to produce an errorless original draft of either a creation, invention or research. The same objective continued in the future where developing a digital manuscript took over from the manual one and scientific journals took the center stage.

What Makes a Modern-Day Manuscript?

By all means a modern-day manuscript aims at disseminating a clear and structured piece of the author’ or researcher’s creations or findings respectively. Through it he/she tries to communicate with the world flawlessly. While saying that, we must not forget that all manuscripts are not same. They have been classified into categories as per the subject orientation. The chief classifications are,

• A) Literary Manuscript: Usually prepared by litterateurs who draft novel, poem, short story or screenplay. It is later gets posted directly or with the help of publishers.
• B) Academic or Scientific Manuscripts: These types of manuscripts are handiwork of research scholars, scientists or maintainers of peer-reviewed database Scopus.
• C) Historical Manuscripts: As the name suggests the Historical Manuscript comprises of handwritten texts, codices and records created on Papyrus, palm leaves, parchment etc.

Common Mistakes in Composing Manuscripts

While seems like a cakewalk, composing a flawless manuscript is a daunting task in reality. To deliver a striking, target oriented and meaningful manuscript takes a good amount of hard work and sincerity. For example, while preparing an academic or scientific manuscript the author must not allow the jargons eclipse the elegance of literature. It must be short and crispy to the reader and above all understandable for the target group.

Another aspect is Coherence. If coherence in writing is not maintained throughout the Manuscript then it loses its worth. The composer must organize the ideas in such a way that the reader catches the relevance of the topic. That apart, inducting incomplete that is harmful than anything else in the manuscript. Always provide complete data by taking the reader as a layman and not an expert. The same is true for the ‘description’ of the studies. In the absence of the detailed description of the case studies the result becomes very clumsy to understand and leaves the reader completely at sea. Hence, keep in mind to,

• a) Chose Substance over Jargons
• b) Maintain Coherence Throughout
• c) Provide Complete Data
• d) Attach Details of Case Studies and
• e) Get checked by External Reviewer

Scopus Scenario; What they Detect  

Having equipped with a formidable task of providing academics and researchers with a complete guide to refer the Scopus journals or Scopus-indexed journals is owned by Elsevier. It has over 5000 listed publishers to its name with 25,000 active titles. The journals, conference proceedings and books included in Scopus are immensely useful for oneself irrespective of his/her status as a budding researcher or experienced academic. Taking into account the research and academic credibility Scopus enjoys it becomes an utmost necessity to keep the database manuscripts flawless and here come the gigantic tasks of editors. Having even a marginal error in the database could prove fatal literary here. While editing world’s largest abstract and citation database the editors become very particular for the following points,

a) Misaligned Scope: The most important aspect that Scopus journal editors check and reject the manuscript if it focuses outside the journal’s stated aim. It becomes a ground for immediate rejection. If a paper is blindly sent to multiple journals without adhering to the topic shout then it becomes major mistake.

b) Grammatical Error: Being a major international database for reference the Scopus needs to be awkward phrasing, overuse of non-relevant jargons, common grammatical errors in written English committed by non-native speakers. To avoid such a scenario the sender could manage and get a language certificate before forwarding the manuscript.

c) Tables and Figures Violating Format: The editors at Scopio are very particular for maintaining the acceptable format for tables and figures. Hence, even a slightest violation of specified minimum 300 DPI for figures and APA-style formatting for figures will lead to a rejection.

d) Plagiarism Issues: While the Scopio-index journals are equipped with advanced plagiarism detection tools like iThenticate or CrossCheck, it finds both plagiarism and self-plagiarism cases within a fraction of seconds. Copying from other available journals and even your own productions published in the past will lead to the outright rejection of manuscript.

e) Absence of Proper Conclusion: The conclusion part of the manuscript must be filled with concrete ideas rather than abstract ones. Simply summarizing the studies taken up in the research without interpreting them in reference to the past researches makes no point for the inclusion in the Scopio and becomes one of the most common mistakes causing rejection.