Before submitting a paper...

I've overheard confessions from senior academics who admit that they knowingly submit before their work is ready. As a result, they find it mentally difficult to critically assess their own work after publishing a paper. This can't be a good sign.

The following are guidelines for me. I've broken several of these in the last couple of years, and regretted it.

1. Have you finished the work? In other words, are you being pressured to publish before you're happy? Supervisor pressure, the risk of being scooped, money or time issues... these are all indicators that you might want to think carefully about submitting.
   
2. When did you finish doing this work? If less than 3 months ago, don't submit.
3. Have you discussed this with other people in your field? This is strongly recommended, since the easiest person to fool is ourselves.
4. Have you written any part of your submission in such a way that it could be seen as an affront to another academic? However illogical their research might seem, this is a bad idea. Perhaps think about writing a reply to their paper instead.
5. Have you had the paper proofread by someone else? More than one person?
   
6. When did you finish writing the submission? If less than 1 month (and preferably 3 months) ago, don't submit. Check it, make sure you would be happy with submitting it, then put it in a drawer somewhere, and do something else.
7. Once bringing the submission back out of its hiding place, have you checked it over thoroughly again? Do you still agree with what you've written?!
8. If you've passed all the above points, here's a difficult one. Try to question/disprove as much of your submission as possible. Take some time to do this thoroughly. If you succeed in finding holes in your work, you can still submit, but you may need to rewrite and add caveats. Pride should have no place in a scientific establishment. This step should be repeated a year after the paper has been published - it encourages personal reflection, which is probably not a bad thing for a scientist.

Everything checks out? You probably have a scientific paper. You've got it past yourself, so the journal editors and reviewers should be easy, right?

Probably easier, but not easy - you still need to think carefully about where to submit. The minimum three months between finishing the work and submitting should help tone down the "this is so exciting, like, the most exciting thing in the world, man!" and the "Nature have to accept this, otherwise they're just being small minded" thought-processes. If it hasn't, either you haven't waited long enough, you're deluded, or you really do have a piece of ground-breaking work.

Good luck!