What are the super cool tricks to getting published in high impact journals?

High impact journals, or in other word, top ranked journals (based on IF) are those publishing the state-of-the-art research works with high percentage of novelty and originality. In my own opinion following tips are very important in getting into the high impact journals:

• Select a real challenging problem whose solution/amendment significantly impacts on the domain.
• Formulate the problem (using mathematical modeling, visualization, or empirical experiment depending on the domain) and let peers/reviewers see the significance of the problem.
• Propose a solution with high degree of novelty in a way that has not been undertaken before for the same problem.
• Throughout the research try to follow the conventions of research in your domain in the highest possible level, especially when it comes to evaluation and validation of your work.
• In data collection phase, try to follow the most appropriate approaches and use accurate tools to measure/quantify. Maybe looking at similar papers can help you in this.
• Avoid silly mistakes. Usually reviewers do not expect to see silly mistakes in the work. If you make small obvious mistakes, how can reviewers ensure the rest of your work is error-free.
• Show high level of confidence in understanding and expertise over the domain. If you need to review related works in your paper, try to select those closely related to your work; not any work.
• Present your work nicely. Avoid English errors (no grammar and no spelling). Use professional drawing tools to draw high quality figures, draw nice tables, use proper sizing for objects in the paper, not too big, not to small.
• There is an approach by some young authors that leave some works to be done in revisions stage, which is not correct to me. Don't send incomplete work to any high quality journal. There will hardly be any chance to correct mistakes. The review is more to evaluate the significance of the work, the novelty, relevance to the journal, and research practice presented in the paper. Reviewers are not English proof reader and their job is not to correct you.

There may be lot more tips that I will compile as I noticed. Hope it works.

Others have asked and tried to answer this question before. Here is an ad-hoc list of resources relevant to your question, both print and online.

• Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.). (2000). Guide to publishing in psychology journals. Cambridge University. (field: psychology)

• Bem, D. J. (2003) Writing the empirical journal article. url. (field: psychology)

• Roediger III, H. L. (2007). Twelve tips for authors. APS Observer, 20. url. (field: psychology)

• King, G. (2006). Publication, publication. PS: Political Science & Politics, 39, 119-125. doi:10.1017/S1049096506060252 (field: political science)

• Senturia, S. D. (2003). Guest editorial: How to avoid the reviewer's axe: One editor's view. Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, 12, 229-232. doi:10.1109/JMEMS.2003.814319 (field: mechanics)

• Manuscript review histories of the Journal of Consumer Research. One can track the whole review history of a couple of papers including the submissions, reviews, resubmissions, etc. (field: consumers)

There is really nothing special that causes your paper to be accepted in a high-impact journal. If we start by looking at Science and Nature, they publish material more like a newspaper would than a scientific journal ( I am not saying it is without worth, they just have different criteria for their selection). The material needs to be extraordinary by, for example, being "sensational" in some way, by affecting many, or by causing a change in paradigm. It is really hard to design your research to obtain such results. They may be a result of good design but also luck. So if we disregard from results that fall into the science/nature categories and focus on more normal science output the following (adapted from Lichtfouse, 2013) will be the basis for high-impact publications:

• Select your journal carefully
• Be careful to follow the instructions for authors
• Focus the article on one finding
• Prepare one figure that shows or illustrates the main main finding
• Explain your new finding in the abstract, the discussion AND the conclusions
• Delete any irrelevant results or those that are not explained
• Distinguish clearly between the results from your study and those of others
• Include a good dose of education and dissemination
• Read your article at least five times before submitting it
• make sure your manuscript is written in good English

While this may look like generic advise, it is followed by so few that it will set your manuscript apart from the majority. Some of the points also involve serious work so it is perhaps a deceptively simple list.

Lichtfouse, E., 2013. Scientific writing for impact journals. Nova, New York.