Hi everyone welcome back to my channel. I'm mel i'm an uruguayan neuroscientist and on the side of my phd i have this youtube channel in which i interview scientists from all over the world. Today's guest has a different topic to share with us than the other people i have brought before her. Her name is manuela marescotti. She's from italy and currently she was working and she's living in scotland. She has a phd in science. So she she's a scientist partly works in science but on the other part she's working in scientific communication and more specifically she is an editor on a scientific journal. So i think it's very interesting to bring someone from that world to tell us something about how this looks like so hi manuela. Thank you so much for being here with us today. I really appreciate it. Hi mel thank you very much to inviting me to have this chat with you. I'm very happy to be here today so to start. Tell us a bit about your story. What did you study. My name is manuela mariscotti. And i'm originally from naples in italy. I have studied medical biotechnology at the undergraduate at the university of nepal. Federico secundo and there i have also done my master in medical biotechnology later. I moved to edinburgh scotland to do my teaching in neuroscience besides my research based career i focused in the last years on the science communication aspect within academia and in fact after being the editor of the newsletter for the genetic society uk for four years i joined the two years silver ego the brain communications journal as a scientific editor you have to know that it is very important for scientists to publish their work as articles in the peer-reviewed journals brain communications is one of them. What are these peer-reviewed journals. These are journals. Um and maybe the most famous that you maybe have heard about are nature science where the articles that contain the results of a study undergo a very precise and specific quality. Check this quality check is done by other scientists that work in the same field so they are experts of that specific subject so they check the kind of data that are presented in all their aspects as a scientific editor for this journal.

I i check that the quality of the data follow the rules established by this journal so i check the statistics for our rules as well as other aspects in which the way in which these data are presented and tell us how is it like to be a scientific journal editor. I don't have a really typical day at the moment because i still combine job as a scientific editor with a job as a scientist as i am a postdoc i need to have some a kind of routine because it helps me to focus on all the different tasks first of all i try. I find very useful since i have many different tasks to deal with for the journal to focus on priorities of the day first thing in the morning when i sit in front of my computer go through the manuscripts that i have to check so usually the manuscripts after they have been checked by the reviewers and a decision has been suggested by the associate editors so they go in my hands and i check if all the data confirm with the quality required by our journal. Guideline i send my recommendations to the editor-in-chief that approves finally the decision. Uh from the associators and my recommendations after that i deal with all the other uh queries that i get by email queries. Go to the editorial office manager therefore i get through here all the questions from the authors and try to help sometimes the authors to uh to find for example a good way to organize their data in a graphical abstract. Uh i try to understand you. Know their explanation for a particular way the issue with their their data lastly i also focus on a very important aspect making posts for the do for the papers on our journal twitter account. It is very important for me that is to capitalize the work done by scientists so i think it is very important also to use uh the social media to spread the voice about a new work that has been published so uh this is more or less my routine of course with some variations.

According to the day it's a very dynamic kind of job um that that is different from the research related one but uses a lot on my background cool and can you give us a couple of examples of writing tips or common mistakes that people do since we have you an expert on this i realized that there are so many things that phd and postdocs as a potential authors don't know about the uh publishing process in particular i realized that after so much work they have done also so much commitment they have put in to prepare images plots data they don't amplify the news about they don't capitalize really what they have done and so i gave in a post tips about fast ways considering that scientists are always super busy to spread the voice about their the recent publication also another aspect is advice about making figures if they are solid if they are visually presented in an organized and clear way for the reader through instagram posts or short videos these are uh i am working also on supporting these contacts with longer videos on my youtube channel science.manuela so if you are interested in this topic please give a look to these two profiles. I think it's very important to mention because maybe for those that are in science for a long time they of course they they have published papers or they read papers all the time and they know that they are scientific journals and they are editors and there's people that working in that site but sometimes for the early people in the career they don't know about this as an option they don't consider it they don't think about it so i think it's very cool to use this video as this opportunity and secondly i think it's very important what you do in general because there's a lot of research being done and sometimes it's not a matter of producing research that is something that is being done all over the world but filtering this research and really being careful with not spreading misinformation not spreading research that has mistakes being very careful in the type of methods statistics and so on that you are using to really know that the result that you are seeing is really what you're what you think you're seeing so i think that this work is really really important and those were all the questions actually that i have for you for today so thank you so much manuela for giving your time thank you again all of you for listening to my experience and thank you for mel for inviting me today to share um my experience a good day bye and thank you for your attention if you like the video i invite you to subscribe to the channel i also have a patreon account and with every patreon contribution i have i can collaborate with freelancers in latin america to keep producing these videos and see you in the next video.