The publishing process - Strategic writing - The reading toolkit

Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021

The publishing process
Strategic writing
The reading toolkit

Once you have submitted your manuscript for publication, you may be tempted to rest on your laurels. Your task is finished, after all, and the manuscript is in the mail, about to be processed by the great but fairly unknown system that is the publication process. You know your paper will be handled by an editor, seen by reviewers and then either accepted for publication or not … but not much else. How much do you trust this unknown process? How is your paper going to be evaluated? What do reviewers consider when determining the quality of your work? What makes a paper attractive to editors, and conversely, what immediately raises red flags in their minds? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, how can you be confident that you have written a “publishable” paper?

Wouldn’t you want to first know how (perfect) reviewers evaluate your paper?14 Submitting it to a journal without understanding how they will evaluate it is taking a gamble. Wouldn’t you rather know the rules of the game before you decide to play a hand?

You may feel crushed if you hear from your dream journal that reviewers found your contribution insufficient for publication. But instead you should feel proud that you received any feedback, negative or not. That you were reviewed indicates that you have overcome the first tier of rejections. The exact percentage depends on the journal, but a large number of papers that are submitted are never reviewed at all; they are rejected outright in the first two rounds of cuts. Surprised? After all, shouldn’t all submissions be reviewed? They should not.

You’ve been unsubmitted. The first cut is made by administrative staff or an editorial assistant. You will know this fate has befallen your paper if you receive an email very soon after submission (generally within a week) telling you that your paper has been “unsubmitted”. Papers are unsubmitted for a wide variety of reasons. Perhaps you did not keep to the allocated word count or forgot to include the requested author statement. Perhaps you followed the Chicago style when you were supposed to format your citations using the MLA style. For some reason or other, your paper was deemed faulty at the submission level, not the scientific level. What can you do? Simply follow the instructions in the journal’s email reply, fix whatever mistakes might have been made, and resubmit. If the instructions are unclear, feel free to write back to the journal for clarifications; it is better to seek clarification than to waste the time of the journal with another faulty submission. The fact that your paper was unsubmitted should have little impact on your chances of having it published. At larger journals, the editor may never even know that your paper was unsubmitted in the first place.

You’ve been desk rejected. The second cut is made by an editor or a board of associate editors who deemed your paper unworthy of being sent to reviewers. The percentage of papers that fall into this category is surprisingly large (50% to 80% by our estimates for high impact factor journals). Not only are desk rejections now a common occurrence, they are an increasingly common occurrence as the number of articles submitted worldwide increases. There are only so many top-tier journals that the entire academic research pool can aim for. Occasionally, the reason for rejection will be that the level of English is too poor to allow for a fair evaluation of the science. But generally, the majority of rejections fall within two categories: inappropriate submission and or insufficiently significant submission.

Inappropriate submission: the submitted paper does not fit within the scope of the journal. Are you submitting basic research to a journal that publishes applied research? Does the journal have a history of publishing papers in your subject area, or are you trying your luck because your work is related to the kind of research that the journal publishes? Is your paper valuable only to a subset of experts in the field and not the broad readership of the journal? Is your work too specialized or too basic? Many editors complain about the volume of inappropriate submissions they receive, despite their efforts to make the journal’s vision and scope transparent. Do not add to the problem by trying the shotgun approach to publishing: sending your paper to enough places, hoping one will stick. Snipe instead—the collective body of scientific editors in the world will thank you for it.

Insufficiently significant submission: the research is not significant enough to attract the attention of top tier journals. Many authors misunderstand what “significance” means here. They confuse impressive result with significant result. Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation in which you’re working on a voice recognition technology for people with a very heavy accent.

An increase in voice recognition accuracy from 40% to 70% would be an impressive result. But it isn’t necessarily a highly significant one. In terms of usefulness, an increase in voice recognition from 90% to 97% would be a less impressive result, but a much more significant one. Both of these results would be highly valued by the scientific community, but should be published in different journals. The first result (40 → 70%) would be significant only to other researchers in the field of voice recognition and should therefore be published in a journal that caters to those specific readers. The second result (90 → 97%), pushes the technology over a tipping point of real-world usability, and is thus highly significant to a larger number of readers, including potentially those outside academia (e.g. software engineers who can now build this technology into their programs).

You can still garner many citations if you are published outside of the usual top-tier journals. Don’t always aim for the top (where you are highly likely to miss), instead, aim for the appropriate tier based on significance. Desk rejections can and should be avoided by being a more discerning and careful submitter, not one who tries their luck at a game that we call the “paper submission staircase.”15

Sometimes, you are unsure whether a journal would be interested in your type of results or research. It happens, especially if your field falls across research boundaries (e.g. bioinformatics or biomechanical engineering). You could then send a pre-submission letter16 to the journal editor. Most journals even put the format of such a letter on their websites. In that letter, you would present a short brief of your research and contribution, and ask whether it is of interest to the readers of the journal. Two things can happen, both of them good for you. One, the editor politely declines your offer and suggests an alternative journal which may be more appropriate. Two, the editor expresses moderate interest, but mentions areas which would increase his or her interest. Be aware, however, that not all journals accept pre-submission letters.

Now that you’ve taken all of this into consideration, you should be able to get your paper past the editor’s desk and in front of reviewers. It should all be smooth sailing from here, shouldn’t it?