>>11295132Lets break it down. Who do you want to be taken seriously by? Sounds retarded, but most of "the scientific community" can have vastly different opinions on what kinds of papers are legitimate, but the average person who sees a post on IFuckingLoveScience doesn't care at all if you're a PhD or not.
If you want people in the field to take your paper seriously, what you're really looking for is for them to write their own papers that reference yours. That's how researchers get street cred. It's going to be hard to get a legitimate study to reference yours, because they often really care about how legitimate the journal is that it's published in. So how to you get published in a well respected peer-reviewed journal? You have to convince them that 1) You know what you're doing and 2) You're not lying. If you have a PhD, you have something you can point to and say "See, you can trust me, I know how to do research and publish a paper." Sadly, if you don't have that, they are alot less likely to be interested in you.
There is one way thought that I haven't seen anyone reference yet: Get a professor to co-write the paper. This is how some undergrad students get their papers published. They approach a professor with their plan fully set out, and the professor basically just signs off on it. Then the student follows through with the tests, writes it up, and the professor makes whatever changes they like. If you're not in undergrad and have never gotten your Bachelors degree this might be not be possible, because a professor won't be willing to stick their name to any old joe schmoe with a bright idea. But if you are really determined to get this paper published in a respectable journal, you need to start contacting professors about them co-authoring a paper with you. 1/2
