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NicolasCage in right. Journal with high impact factors get many submissions a year and only choose the ones they see most fit for publishing. If your research is cutting edge or on a popular topic, your chances are much higher. I know my research has a very small chance of being published in a high impact factor journal because I'm working on a sub-field that just isn't very popular. If I try sumitting with those journals I usually get rejected because although my article is interesting, it doens't appeal to the audience of the journal. Also you need to have some credibility when publishing in high end journals. Having other pubished and cited articles may help. Having an important co-author, such as maybe your professor, helps as well. When you're finishing a first manuscript, you could ask your professor how high you could aim. Based on the asvice of your professor, aim high, but don't be surprised when your article gets rejected. Then slowly go down until you find a journal willing to publish your article. At least, this is how my professor taught me to do it..

Thank you for your advice. There are some things I will certainly try. Your assumptions are right. I'm the one that designs the research, does the analysis and writes the paper. When I ask for advice during the data-preparation or analysis phase, both my professor as my second promotor are very helpful. However, when I'm in the writing phase, it seems I'm only slowed down by my second promotor. My professor says he doesn't have time to check my manuscripts, so he mainly comments on the tone and content of the manuscript, which is great. However he doesn't want to get involved in any differences we have when it comes to writing. My fiance is a native english speaker and sometimes I check some text with him. He agrees with me on the grammatical errors my second promotor made, although I'm still also still learning a lot from him. When I'm writing I always have a dictionary and thesaurus close by and I always check every word or sentence I'm unsure about. Although my sentences are not always as smooth as those of a native speaker, I'm pretty sure they are at least correct. Basically the problem breaks down to two smaller problems. The first is style, the second is grammar. I spend a lot of time making sure that my manuscript is easy to read, doesn't repeat the same words over and over again, and keeps the reader interested. My co-author has a different writing style and tries to force this onto me by for instance replacing words with their synonyms. She also swears by this fixed structure of the text, which I have never seen in any article or writing course. She tries molding my manuscript into this structure, she herself uses for all her articles. I guess you can say that this is a matter of taste. I prefer texts in which arguments are ordered so they are easy to read, she prefers a fixed structure. I prefer some variation in my words, while she likes to use the same words over and over again to keep things simple. The second issue is the grammar thing. Here, she is mostly wrong. For intance she often makes mistakes on the verbs. When I write "Many European countries are faced with..", she corrected this with "Many European countries are being facing". I guess I could indeed solve the grammar issue, by explaining why I don't use her suggestions, until she gets the point. However, the style issue is something completely different. On the one hand, the articles will be in my thesis, so I feel they should be written in a way that I prefer. Of course I look at other articles to discern the common style of writing in the field, so it's never exactly in a way that I would prefer. On the other hand, I would like to keep my co-authors satisfied. I guess we will both have to compromise on style...

Wow, I feel privileged. We share a small office with the four of us, but we each have our own desk and a cupboard shelve, so it's not too bad. We have some unwritten rules, but we get along just fine, so there's nop offical rules or anything. - When you get a call on your cell-phone, you leave the office - Ask before using someone's books/stuff - If you need to have a conference, go to the conference room and don't stay in the office Besides this, we all use headphones, keep the office clean and lock the door when we're last to leave.

My second promotor is a co-author of my manuscripts. She is very involved in my research and ususally gives good advice. However, when it comes to writing the manuscript, she tries to control me and the manuscript in an almost obsessive way. She keeps changing my text, replacing words with their synonyms. For instance if I write "The aim of this research is...", she replaces this with "The goal of the research is...". Every time I send something to her, I spend half of my week going through all the changes she makes. I would be OK with this if her suggestions were based on the content/method of the research, but it's mostly on the style of writing. English is not our first language, but I consider my English skills good enough for writing an article. However, when I get her revisions, I spend a day correcting grammatical errors and unclear language. She then gets upset when she sees the next version without her "suggestions" in it. I tried suggesting to her that she please leave the english writing to me, but it didnt help. When submitting the last manuscript I eventually caved after months of revisions going back and forth without any significant improvements and submitted the article with all her suggestions. Got it back from the reviewers saying that the english and general style of writing was horrible. I do not ever want to go through this again. First, I was ashamed to read the reviewers comments, and second I will waste months on every manuscript if this continues. My second promoter seems convinced that I can't write because I keep rejecting her "suggestions", but really they are just crap. I enrolled for a writing course just so that I can write my next article without having to take suggestions from anyone but the teachers, even though I already took a similar course during my master's. How do I open the conversation on this without hurting anyone?