HOW TO PUBLISH WORK IN INDEXED SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS - AN OVERVIEW

This paper sets out to tackle the issue of the criteria which should be met prior to submission of papers to indexed scientific journals. Firstly, the author addresses the field of qualitative research and tries to define the general characteristics of such works, and secondly, some clarification is brought with respect to the imbalance between the number of published articles in favor of quantitative research. Many authors from our region restate observations and cite other authors, and use the term qualitative study for such articles. This paper is also concerned with an overwhelming number of misconceptions which can be found in the articles made by the authors from the Balkans. These misconceptions include: (1) confirmation or rejection of hypotheses by correlations, (2) perform an analysis on item-by-item basis, (3) application of parametric statistics on non-parametric set of data; and so forth. Each of the mentioned misconceptions is explained in this paper, but it has not been attempted to prove them as this had been done before in numerous up-to-date textbooks. This paper also deals with action research, with respect to their relatively insignificant presence in highly ranked scientific journals, since they combine characteristics of qualitative and quantitative works. Some authors often fall into the trap of putting every action change in the focus of action research. Reproducibility of study is one of the most fundamental scientific prerequisites, and it has to be met by any study – qualitative, quantitative and action research alike.