A helpful image is to think about submitting a manuscript to an international journal as a way of participating in the international scientific community. You are, in effect, joining an international conversation. To join this conversation, you need to know what has already been said by the other people conversing. In other words, you need to understand the ‘‘cutting edge’’ of your scientific discipline: what work is being done now by the important players in the field internationally. This means: . getting access to the journals where people in the field are publishing; . subscribing to the e-mail alert schemes offered by journal publishers on their websites so that you receive tables of contents when new issues are published; and . developing skills for searching the Internet and electronic databases in libraries to which you have access.

Patience and a sense of humour!