As I scanned through the bad news, I noticed with interest that my reaction was strangely muted. Of course I liked the paper and wanted it to get published, and was disappointed when “on this occasion”, the editors “regretted” to inform us that they were “unable to offer publication” – how well I know the standard euphemisms all editors learn to cut and paste from handy templates their very first week on the job. But the fact that I’m not the first author seemed to impart a detached, almost anaesthetic vibe to the whole dreary proceedings. When you’re the lead author, a rejection feels like a kick in the stomach every single time, no matter how many years have passed since your first. When you’re not, the overriding reaction is more a fatalistic sense of impending tedium.
It all started last year. The original manuscript, authored by a few of my colleagues, had been close to getting into a respectable, general-interest biology journal of impact factor circa 10, but a few key experiments were lacking and the referees, although largely positive, had failed to persuade the editor that any future efforts were worth waiting for. Meanwhile, the first author had moved on and I was drafted in to fill in a few missing pieces experimentally. As my efforts proved useful, I got bumped up from middle to second author and, sort of by default, ended up taking control of the car halfway through its rather bumpy road trip, even though I was still only riding shotgun.
Submitting papers, as many of you know only too well, takes a hell of a lot of time. The text, for me, is the relatively easy part. But your average multi-panel figure can take days to assemble and get just right. The files come off the confocal microscope in inscrutable formats that only ImageJ can read; the TIFFs must be created there in its serviceable but clumsy little universe, their channels separated or merged, then imported into Photoshop for tweaking and cropping before being placed into Illustrator and properly scaled and labelled for the final mock-up.
It’s not hard, but it eats up an amazing amount of time. So when the boss casually remarks, “I think maybe we should add that other control panel to this figure, and can you show the RGB merges as well – oh, and [yelling at your back as you try to escape down the corridor] maybe make a blow-up of all the relevant areas and put them alongside, with a few arrows?” – your heart sinks. Especially as, when you’re riding shotgun, it’s not always obvious where the departed first author has actually stashed the original files, let alone what he’s called them. So appended to the usual conveyor belt of image processing is a flurry of emails with someone whose mental hard-drive is slowly being overwritten by newer and more exciting things.
The rejection letter I was reading was from the first attempt at resubmission. After overhauling the figures and text, we’d gone for this particular journal for its audience, even though its impact factor was significantly lower (about 7). But despite nearly squeaking in at the previous and more significant journal, the current one hadn’t even sent it out for review. Why? Because we didn’t have the “mechanism”. (As the first author so eloquently put it by email, if we’d had the mechanism, we would hardly be submitting the paper to them, would we?)
So what to do next? The paper is nice, self-contained; the referees of the first journal thought it important, innovative and of interest to a broad readership, and it deserves to be in a decent journal. Yet all of us were reluctant to spend much more time on this – especially me, with my ticking time bomb of an expiring fellowship. I certainly couldn’t take the experiments to the next level without abandoning my own projects altogether, and to be frank I wasn’t keen on spending even a few more days preparing the manuscript for a major rewrite.
In the end, the decision was ludicrous, and was based entirely on formatting. I drew up a list of half a dozen suitable journals of about the same impact factor and made a table with three columns: word limit, figure limit, and structure (whether the Results and Discussion should be merged or separate, or whether it didn’t matter), and we just chose the journal that was most flexible – in other words, where we wouldn’t have to make cosmetic changes like cutting or rearranging words, or relegating figures to Supplementary (which would have involved having to change text on the figures, or rearranging some of the panels). Fortunately it was the journal I was secretly favoring, but I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit would have sacrificed that choice if it weren’t convenient. It just seemed like enough was enough: we’re here to do experiments, not to fiddle endlessly with Adobe products. Either the work should made public, or it shouldn’t.
Ludicrous or no, in the end I was able to resubmit in under thirty minutes. Just a quick EndNote reformat, a tweak of the running title, a simple conversion of all the figures from CMYK to RGB. (And of course the cover letter – nothing amuses an editor more than reading the name of the journal you were previously sucking up to.) Blissfully the current submission system was a lot more intuitive than the previous one and, twenty-four hours later, my adopted baby was safely in peer review. It got me to thinking, though: we don’t necessarily need the utopian ideal of one universal submission template for all journals. If journals are flexible and adopt a relatively standard format, it doesn’t take long to reformat, and I think most people could spare those thirty minutes. But journals, especially in that key 5-to-8 impact factor range who bottom-feed off the rejects of their betters, beware: if you insist on having non-standard formatting or are completely rigid in some of your requirements, busy people like me will probably just shrug and choose your competitors instead.
bq. Either the work should made public, or it shouldn’t.
Here’s the crunch. Scientists are just so damned desperate to get published these days we’ll put up with all sorts of shit to do so. Time, I say, to take back the initiative.
“This paper? It’s too good for you. Ha! Take that, mid-range-Impact-Factor-journal.”
I think a lot of the formatting problems will vanish when journals finally abolish their print editions. Having said that, there are online-only journals with length restrictions. But it will be easier – especially as figures can be optimized for the screen, which is easier than trying to come up with a compromise that will look good both in print and online.
Wresting back control…I don’t know. It seems like an especially heavy oil tanker on a one-way trip to the edge of the earth.
I don’t share your optimism w.r.t. formatting. With the new online formats (beta.cell, Biochemical Journal, &c.) you’ll have to put this bit there and that bit in the other field.
But you’re right that at least the figures will only have to look good on screen.
I think you are right that journals should be much more author-friendly (i.e. neutral) on submission format, especially a journal with a very high rejection rate. Authors can more usefully get into the details of format when they have received the peer-reviewers’ and editors’ comments and are asked to revise their paper for probable eventual publication.
I also think it helps authors to have manuscript transfer systems, for exmample ours at NPG in which an author whose manuscript has been declined at one journal can opt, if she/he wishes, to resubmit to another (if also published by NPG) – if the author wants to do this, it’s a one-click procedure and all the fields of the submission process don’t need to be filled in again. There is a consortium of neuroscience publishers who offer the same service- Nature Neuroscience is part of that.
As it happens, Maxine, the journal which rejected our resubmission gave us a deflect option to a sister journal – but if we removed 50% of the words. Needless to say that wasn’t an option I favored. (Note: this is a relatively short manuscript, only 20 typewritten double-spaced pages. There wasn’t a lot of fat to trim)
To be clear, they’d send it out for review in the sister journal, with no guarantee of publication. A straight deflect of an acceptable manuscript – that would be worth cutting for.
bq. “As the first author so eloquently put it by email, if we’d had the mechanism, we would hardly be submitting the paper to them, would we?”
Heh. That one rang a bell with me, Jenny – I had exactly this experience with a journal some time in the past, though I eventually got it past them after a one-to-one chat with the editor (who basically told me to ignore some comments of that type by the referees).
It is certainly a noticeable trend over the last decade that all the journals are getting more and more fussy (mechanism, everything has to fit, no loose ends, no unexplained observations etc etc). I have misgivings about this, since I don’t think messy biological science lends itself intrinsically to such “perfection”. My worry is that the journals’ insistence on this will postively encourage “extensive data editing” (by which I mean particularly people deep-sixing experiments that don’t quite fit the picture they are drawing).
The NPG manuscript transfer system is an “all or nothing” one – ie the author decides whether to transfer the ms exactly as is (and the second journal, if it wants to publish the paper, will advise on format later on down the line) or the author doesn’t use it at all. The author is also able to revise the ms (eg in response to reviewers’ comments) and resubmit to journal 2 using the usual submission system as well, of course.
In journals’ defence, these days we get so many more submissions than in previous years – partly because scientists submit more and more papers per se, and partly because it is easier for authors to try a shot at what they think is the best journal first, than it was in the old postal, wait around, days.
I’m not disagreeing with Austin but there are always various perspectives of looking at an issue – and authors always want journals to make decisions quickly, however many submissions that journal is dealing with.
I’ve been on the other side, Maxine, so I know what you’re saying. I was not actually criticizing the original journal for rejecting the paper. I was wondering why the second journal – a far less prestigious one – was being fussier than a journal twice its impact factor in not even sending it for review. Especially as the missing link it desired was the sort of result that could make the paper eligible to be considered for Nature proper. It just didn’t seem like the criteria matched the caliber of the journal, and if those are its criteria I wonder it gets anything at all to publish.
BTW, the journal that wanted us to transfer after cutting half the words before sending it out for review was part of the NPG stable. So it’s not always that straightforward.
Austin, I too worry about the need for a ‘perfect story’, coupled to the pressures we have to publish in the first place. We have to hope that people self-police and that co-authors take the time to know what has, and has not, been done at the bench to support — or discount — the stories to which they are adding their names and reputations.
Well of course _ authors always want journals to make decisions quickly_ –so they can get on to the next journal or work on the next problem. Authors shouldn’t have to hang around for journals to get their act together–and they don’t. They go to PLoS, or Precedings or arXiv or even self-publishing. Journals need to respond to this appropriately if they are to remain relevant.
Bollocksing NN formatting. When’s MT4, again?
It’s definitely better to be rejected without review than rejected after review, so if the impact-7 journal is only taking Nature caliber stories these days, it’s better to find out sooner rather than later. Rejecting before review was one of the innovations I introduced to the journals I last managed – in addition to being better for authors, it saves so much time and fuss and precious referee pool patience…but as an editor, you need to know where to go for good, quick advice.
Yes, I was “seconding” the experience as Jenny clarified – I had chosen a “not-quite-top-of-category specialist journal” as I had an interesting series of observations and some mechanistic clues. As my then section boss said when the journal’s referees ostensibly demanded “fully-defined molecular mechanism”
J Biol Chem? You jest?
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
I.e., In the scientific food chain, J Biol Chem can look pretty tasty from some perspectives.
I wasn’t proud of my JBC paper until I heard from my former supervisor in Holland that their department only requires their students to have 3 papers of impact factor 1 or 2, so even though I only had one paper, my total impact factor was still higher than that of her students with 3 first author papers.
My 3rd author paper (I got bumped down from second to third when someone else suddenly did a lot of last minute stuff) is in a “better” journal, but I’m actually proud (in retrospect) that I got my very first (and only first-author) paper in at IF 7ish.
Ach! Impact Factors! growl
I’m with Richard on this one. If journals want to hang on to their impact factors they need to give the authors that choose to publish with them decent service and encouragement to submit. Back in the 1990’s you might have been able to rest on your IF and treat authors like dirt, safe in the knowledge that that IF would keep them coming back. “Treat them mean, keep them keen”. These days the alternatives are beginning to grow in strength and such chauvinism shouldn’t be good enough any more.
ohh and make that double-plus-growl
I think speed is a big factor that can make a journal competitive. When Current Biology started, its USP was the turnaround – I don’t think it debuting at 13 was a coincidence. Also, it was a stroke of genius to have a broad-interest biology journal in the middle range. Not all papers are ‘specialist’ papers, and the majority of these aren’t Science/Nature fodder.
Speed and Expectations. Given that I deal in Olds rather than News, the scientists in my field of interest tend to get used to the sometimes leisurely turnround times of journals in their specialties. So, although they hadn’t ever considered having papers appear in print in less than a year, they discover, almost to their own surprised, that they actually enjoy the experience of having papers come out quickly in PLoS Paperclips, Science and … dare I say it … Nature .
With all the press releasing and hype around big fossil finds I’m surprised anyone has patience with the old-fashioned leisurely methods these days.
Well, yes, but as with everything else, there are a lot of fossil finds that make it into mid-range and speciality journals, and get published without the hoopla that one sees in the high-impact journals (which, to be fair, have press departments that like having papers that are relatively easy to sell to a wider auience – a new hominid or dinosaur is an easier
cellsell than a new seven-transmembrane-helix G-protein-coupled receptor). For every Ardipithecus and Darwinius there are a hundred papers with titles such as ‘forty-seven new species of trilobite from the same Middle-Ordovician locality I described last time’ and ‘A New Record of Kellogg’s Shrew (_Branflakesorerx crunchii_) from the Middle Pleistocene Channel Infill at Tesco’s Car Park, Bletchley: Correlations with the Scandinavian Findus Glaciation’ – these get published in low-impact journals (including museum bulletins). But even here, researchers are more impatient than they were, I sense, for more rapid publication.Ouch.
Yes, it is all a question of hierarchy. For people in physiology / pharmacology JBC has always been seen as a general journal that is not easy to get into. For cell biologists and biochemists it may be bread-and-butter boring.
For calcium signalling specifically, JBC became, in the late 80s and 90s, the kind of go-to spot unless you were in the rather small and exclusive club of “labs that publish in the glamour rags” (_Nature, Science, Cell_, with some other aspiring members). This club would usually consist of less than a dozen labs, so I would guess a tiny percentage of all the labs in the field worldwide. I sometimes have a feeling that the heavily cell/mol biol research-institute based and slightly rarified commentariat at NN don’t always get that most scientists do not publish in the glam rags.
A common phenomenon one sees in academia is people who came from a lab that published regularly in the glam-rags, set up on their own, and then drive themselves near-crazy because they expect to publish their independent stuff in said glam-rags and feel that publishing in lesser places equates to failure. Some do manage it, especially if their independent berth is in a big and well-funded US Univ, but I wouldn’t say the success rate is all that high in the UK setting. Some like this that I have known eventually leaven their aspiration with a bit of realism and settle for “good solid specialist journals but aspiring to more when we have something really good”. Some flame out and disappear.
Given the partiality of the glam-rags for perceived “hot” fields (a famous example in physiology is Nature’s enthusiasm for visual system physiology) most people in discipline communities tend to feel that Nature and the others represent something you keep dreaming of in case you one day stumble upon something (i) really interesting; (ii) with implications far beyond your own patch; and (iii) that all works beautifully with no loose ends (see prev comments). It is partly the hope of this that keeps people going through the everyday struggle of writing grant proposals, fighting to get papers out etc etc.
Beyond the general journals are the specialist category journals. In physiology and pharmacology the “highest ranking” of these typically have IFs in the 5-6 range. There are many people who publish in these exclusively over a career. The general view from such folk tends to be that it is whether your work gets read and cited that counts.
And finally, spare a thought for the folk in journals in things like comparative physiology, where the leading specialist journals have IFs of 1-3! The science in such places is often indistinguishable from that in the IF 3-6 specialist physiology journals except that it is on, say, crab muscle cells rather than rat or human ones.
For a funny and characteristically pungent take on the question of journal “glam factor” vs. scientific content try David Colquhoun’s article here.
Hi Jenny – sure I realise you weren’t criticising the decision, etc. And it seems as if what may have happened here is that the transfer to journal 2 was quick, but its editors made a decision about length once the paper got submitted there.
When Current Biology was launched I think there was a real gap in the biology journal marketplace – particularly as PNAS was much more of a closed shop in those days than it is now (and it still has issues with that image).
However, I do know from years of expereince that you often can’t do anything right as a journal. I am sure this does not apply to anyone posting or commenting here, but the number of times I have seen or heard people heartily endorse the “quick decision, no review” approach, then when they themselves suffer from it, they appeal loudly, write articles about young whippersnapper ignorant editors etc…..and of course the journal’s eds are bound by confidentiality. Basically, if you reject someone, they’ll say anything about you and you can’t contradict them – which is one reason (among others!) why I so admire your post here, Jenny, for its objectivity on that point.
Personally, as I wrote in my first comment in this thread, I think journals – and I include Nature in this – could do more to reduce format requirements when authors submit, as this makes it easier for the author to resubmit elsewhere, and is no easier/harder for the editor to read a paper that is destined for a fast “no thanks” decision, so long as the length is vaguely within reason.
Re the Impact Factor – it is a flawed measure particularly when applied to a whole journal, but it is important to a heck of a lot of people, still. (So they tell us.)
Perhaps I will move that last slightly think-skinned rant over to my blog so we can argue about IFs and fields there (if anyone has the strength, as we’ve no doubt done the topic to death – and beyond – before). That would avoid “derail-ing” the topic here (which I take to be the faff of re-formatting and “tailoring” for different journals, and the tedium of the “journal-shopping” process as a whole.
Talking of which,I think Maxine’s point about:
– is spot-on. Since speed of appearance in a journal would necessarily still reflect how quickly this got done by the Authors, I can’t imagine the journals would be slowed down greatly by Authorial tardiness.
I didn’t write “once the paper is accepted”, though, I think that would present problems for the journal. I wrote:
Authors can more usefully get into the details of format when they have received the peer-reviewers’ and editors’ comments and are asked to revise their paper for probable eventual publication.
I think that it is sensible for the paper to be in correct format before it goes into production, so that the editors can sign it off, so to speak, and so that the author isn’t then faced with production requests for very big changes along the lines of “please cut 10,000 words by tomorrow morning” 😉
The citation in science forum here at Nature Network has lots and lots of links, articles and comments about IFs, it is an ongoing topic as we are all saying…..
Nature letters and Science papers are tricky to reformat – people know that when they write a paper for them, it’s probably going to be rejected and then have to be majorly overhauled. And in some ways this is fair enough, it’s the price you’re willing to pay. (In fact, I know some people who write both formats simultaneously so they’re ready to rock immediately upon rejection) But for everyone else, adapting the simple Abstract, Intro, Results, Disc (or Results + Disc if the author wants), Methods, References, Legends format, and not being too fussy about length or figure number, within reason obviously, would be very helpful for all concerned.
Sorry Maxine. Should have checked exactly what you wrote. I think the essential point of not having to do it every time you re-submit the work is the important one.
_Scientists are just so damned desperate to get published these days we’ll put up with all sorts of shit to do so. Time, I say, to take back the initiative.
“This paper? It’s too good for you. Ha! Take that, mid-range-Impact-Factor-journal.”_
On this point – actually, Richard, it’s very much like this at a top tier. One of the first things I learned as a fledgling editor was how to break into the mosh pit of top-tier editors flocking around high-profile speakers at conferences, all vying for the same paper. If you’ve got something hot, you can pick your venue.
Heh. When I interviewed many yrs ago for a job as a manuscript handler at Nature, that was one of the interview Qs:
Nice, Austin!
Jenny – sometimes those authors even forget to take out the Science address and “Dear editor of science” salutation when they send us the paper, also 😉
If someone sends in a paper to Nature and we like it, we’ll send it out for peer-review whatever the format is like (and, indeed, whichever journal it is addressed to 😉 ).
And finally, spare a thought for the folk in journals in things like comparative physiology, where the leading specialist journals have IFs of 1-3! The science in such places is often indistinguishable from that in the IF 3-6 specialist physiology journals except that it is on, say, crab muscle cells rather than rat or human ones.
ahh… this is partly my memory when publishing stuff on animal pathogenic bacteria. I remember a conversation with a distinguished professor in Cambridge (I was terrified the whole “interview/talk” since I didn’t want to sound daft) who stated “Where have you published? Ah, Vet Mic, that old reliable journal”. Most people in vet sci read it, although the IF isn’t more than 2.5 I think 😉
If you found something that was more movable into the “human” field of course, then you had a slight shoe in to higher IF journals…
And funny enough, I never thought about IF in regards to JBC. Then again, I had a few older profs around me in the biochem area and to the JBC was one of the few journals worth publishing in since everyone read it …. 🙂
All my top papers from my PhD were in J Virology, which was the top journal in the field. I did try Nature once when there was an interesting cancer angle, but was nixed pretty quickly!
“You see something uber-hot at a conference. How do you convince the authors to publish it with us?”
Answer (if you’re a woman, and the prey is a man – which is pretty much true the majority of the time): “Adjust your top so a little bit of your bra strap is showing.” Someone once actually gave this to me as advice!
I must admit I’ve been down on JBC since they accepted a paper from me and never send reviewer comments. Plus it’s so damned huge. Thank God for search.
Yeah, Jenny–you’ve told me about trying to persuade authors to submit stuff to your journal. Did you go to just the people who you knew were likely to publish good stuff?
Thanks Jenny. Now I know why I didn’t get the job…!
Easier on my ego than some of the other possibilities, anyway.
PS Having attended a good many conferences over the years I can also say that I have seen the process you describe in action on more than one occasion.
I have never been set upon by editors at a conference. Should I change my wardrobe?
Get a shave and smarten up, Stephen, and then see if you get the hot editors running after you.
There might be a best-seller in here somewhere! I need to work a scene into my next novel.
I think the bra strap approach wouldn’t work too well at Nature because more than half of the eds are female – but you never know 😉
Just to mention something which seems to have slipped by the wayside, but you have described a nearly universal feeling for working scientists in this post. That sense of deflation that comes later on in your career than the pain of rejection per se, just contemplating the time needed for the language and formatting parts of a rewrite. It comes to me sometimes that now I know the answer to the problem, and I’ve spent time making the hypothesis and its demonstration relatively clear once, I don’t always have the energy to make sure that the scientists outside of my immediate circle also learn that answer because of a mere formatting problem.
Luckily for the publishers, there are all sorts of grad students, techs and postdocs who are looking for more permanent positions and who require, still, their articles to appear in journals whose format is their house style, and whose style is appreciated among readers. Otherwise, I would be tempted to submit everything only to Nature Precedings and PLoS One, whereas in reality, I have yet to do either.
When I was young enough to hang out in bars with my friends, one particular chap would hit on woman after woman until he managed to get a number. He would literally go through 20 or so per evening until he found the one willing or enebriated enough to succumb. Presumably he didn’t have to format himself differently (although maybe if he went to a really different kind of bar…). So in this example and my experience: persistence, persistence, persistence.
Sometimes it’s not worth beating one’s head against the wall, and Jenny your “ludicrous” approach may be useful, but I’m more in the mindset (usually) to take a deep breath, realize that the reviewers may not have had their morning coffee and the editor perhaps had “hotter” things to deal with, and that sometimes it’s just a matter of the combination of an editor who is paying attention, and reviewers who had their paper accepted that day. That and realistic expectations.
Although I also have witnessed Dr. Impressive a few times berate the editor of “Top Journal” into accepting a paper that had soundly been rejected by three reviewers….so that works too I suppose….
I actually enjoy reformatting papers, and do so regularly. It’s quite relaxing, and has me pay attention to the figure details again. It’s also a fun exercise to see how distilled a manuscript can get for the ridiculously short formats of some journals.
“the mosh pit of top-tier editors flocking around high-profile speakers at conferences, all vying for the same paper.”
Wow – that happens?! You know you’ve arrived when…
Benoit, the night I first met my husband, he wanted to see me again but didn’t have any paper to write a phone number on. So he chatted up some other woman at the bar, got her business card, promised to call her… then wrote his number on the back and gave it to me! (I still have it somewhere). I’ve heard that another job offer is a great bargaining chip when negotiating your initial contract or a pay increase… does the same hold true for manuscript acceptances?!
Cath, that is a delightful story…. a napkin would have done the job, but it would definitely have less “bargaining power”…. For manuscripts, not so sure unless there is a mosh pit first, and I wouldn’t know.
Impact factors are a curse, probably worse than the h-factor. Impact factors are incredibly culture specific and operate a classic Rutheford Inversion. Maths has very low impact factors (hovering around 1 – 1.5) while stamp collecting gets impact factors in the 10+ regime. I remember trying to explain to a colleague in Cardiology that he would be a co-author in a submission to a journal on the mechanics of materials with i.f.
One of the first things I learned as a fledgling editor was how to break into the mosh pit of top-tier editors flocking around high-profile speakers at conferences, all vying for the same paper.
I wait for the authors to come to me. If I ‘flocked around’ a speaker, they’d be terrified and run away. And a lot of female editors half my size would get trampled in the crush. And I might trip up over a bra strap or something.
But Henry, what if you showed off a bra strap, as suggested above?
I can’t shake the nagging feeling that when a paper is accepted by the first journal we sent it to then we aimed too low.
In other news I gather this means that the plural desciption for a group of editors is ‘a mosh’?
Man, I can’t believe it’s 2010 and grown up scientists and editors are still discussing journal ranks and hierarchies as if they actually amounted to anything more than historical baggage. When will scholarly publishing finally arrive in the 21st century? 2110?
To be fair, just about everyone now is realizing that IFs are a bad joke at best and a multi-billion fraud at worst, but that’s about as good a beginning as the junkie realizing that the arms get marks from the needles. If anything, this discussion evinces that we still have a long way to go before we can get clean.
As scientists, what should matter most to us is what happens after we make our research public. Today, however, we still care most about getting it published in the first place, devil may care once it’s published. How could scientific communication get the process so 180° backwards and what needs to happen until we set it the right way around?
Bjorn, what is “right” about being concerned about what happens after we make our research public? Why should that matter most?
When I have published a paper, I consider it no longer my responsibility to further publicize it. I discuss its results with the colleagues with whom I could continue work in the field, I do my best to present it in the vehicle that will give it the best visibility to those whom I think would be most interested and who could build upon the truth I’ve helped demonstrate, and that’s it. I know the keywords will show up on appropriate search engines.
Then I go do more science. Not all of us are born communicators, just like not all of us are born entrepreneurs to bring our discoveries to a commercial use of some sort.
Benoit writes:
Although I also have witnessed Dr. Impressive a few times berate the editor of “Top Journal” into accepting a paper that had soundly been rejected by three reviewers….so that works too I suppose
This is another example of urban myth as applied to prestigious journals. I can assure you that the one “top” journal I know well regularly declines to publish papers by Prof Impressives, Nobel laureates included. Believe it or not, our editors are solely interested in publishing the research they, on the advice of fair but independent reviewers, think is the most arresting and interesting.
Some bits of the rest of this discussion seem to me to be confounding the filtering/selection process and the communication/promotion of the work. These are different, yes?
Bjorn, when the people who are going to consider me for a lab head job in two years’ time stop considering the impact factors of the journals I publish in when judging me, then I’ll stop acting as if they amount to something important. Unless I’d rather be flipping burgers, of course. Until then, it is naive to dismiss them on some abstract moral ground. In fact, it’s possibly a little bit patronizing to imply that we are misguided to heed them.
It will be easy for those future historians to diss something that no longer has any impact on them whatsoever; meanwhile here, in the present day, there are rules for getting on in one’s career and most of us have no choice but to follow them.
By the way, although impact factor might not be a good way to judge an individual researcher, I think that on average, when deciding on which journal to publish in, there is a pretty good correlation with quality and number – especially in the 2 to 15 range. (Above that, issues like ‘fashion’ start to weigh in) Why not use it if it’s useful?
I think the bra strap approach wouldn’t work too well at Nature because more than half of the eds are female
Yes Maxine, your poor male editors are at a disadvantage. Maybe low-slung trousers showing a few millimeters of designer Calvin Klein’s?
Re. Bjorn’s comments. I can’t see journal ranks and hierarchies vanishing until there is enough grant money, and enough tenured positions, that everyone who wants one can have one.
Since that is clearly a mythical Utopia, I think the baggage of competition – like fighting to get into “better” journals so your next grant will have a better chance of being funded – will be with us for a while yet.
@ Jennifer: Trust me. Male editors are not at a disadvantage.
I agree, Austin. Unless there is some sort of revolution – but revolutions require martyrs, and I for one am unwilling to sacrifice my career in the name of “principle”. Does that make me cowardly, even morally weak? Possibly. Do I care? Not as much as perhaps I should.
Hey Chris, that’s a relief! What’s your secret? 😉
Good points, Heather! Maybe I should have used other words. I probably meant that we are most anxious about the publishing process, not the reception of our work by the community. Shouldn’t we be more concerned, interested, anxious to see if what we do actually moves the field, rather than some editor?
Now, I agree, you might say (not you, Heather, of course, I’m speaking generally) that you’re the only one who knows best about your field and if nobody but you realizes that true meaning of your research, you’re the only one with the full understanding of it all. In our current system, these colleagues, if they’re right and everybody else is wrong, will not get published and their science may be lost. In a system where even old papers have the potential to be re-discovered, such subjective pre-publication blocks are less severe.
Finally, maybe more to your point, I was thinking in terms of incentives: if we care about science, shouldn’t we provide incentives that researchers strive to become good communicators rather than good networkers and bra-strap displayers? If we agree on that, then we should try and incentivize post-publication impact rather than pre-publication bottlenecks.
On the other hand, if we think that schmoozing with professional editors is the best criterion distinguishing top scientists from the rest, maybe we shouldn’t change journal rank at all?
Hope this was less ambiguous?
Jennifer – also very valid points! I wasn’t, of course, surprised that this discussion is still taking place. As you very correctly point out, this silly metric still decides careers and it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss that (not having tenure I’m of course also guilty of playing the impact factor game). So wasn’t trying to deride everyone in this thread for being backwards, lol 🙂 I was more trying to express my disappointment or exasperation that this anachronism proves to be so resilient. I guess I may have expected more progressive thinking and a notion of how baseless journal ranking is. Which brings me to another one of your excellent counterpoints. You proposed that some journal ranking is useful, because there is a correlation between rank and ‘quality’.
If ‘quality’ is subjective, I have to say that the worst paper in my field in the last 12 months was published in Nature. In mid-IF journals, there are scores and scores of for me completely uninteresting, mundane and irrelevant papers (because they publish more articles than N/S, not because they’re any worse), so for me there is no such subjective correlation. If quality can be measured quantitatively, let’s say in citations, then there is the classic publication in BMJ showing that the correlation between IF and actual citations is extremely weak, if detectable at all:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7079/497
So I cannot see any evidence for such a correlation and hence usefulness. Could it be that this perceived correlation is exactly that: a subjective notion that falls apart when analyzed objectively?
If there indeed is no objective correlation between journal rank and some quantitative measures of ‘quality’, what reasons, other than historical, are there to keep partitioning the scientific literature into 24,000 pieces?
But Henry, what if you showed off a bra strap, as suggested above?
Depends on who’s askin’.
On average, I find that the papers I read in double-digit impact factor journals to be of higher quality than those I read in journals of impact factor 2-6 – more extensive, more likely to be closer to a mechanism rather than merely descriptive, more highly developed overall. I am sure we can all find exceptions, but for me in my field at least, there is a definite trend. I already mentioned that the fashion factor in top-tier journals can sometimes trump ‘quality’, which is why I excluded them from my broad generalization. But having said that, I am almost always more bowled over and excited by the work I read in Nature, Science and Cell than the work I read about in EMBO J or MCB. This may be subjective, but since all readers are subjective and can only judge quality by their own reactions, then perhaps it’s a more valid measure than any quantitative attempts to capture something elusive.
If you find that on average the papers you read in specialist journals of impact 2 are better than those in Nature, then those are the journals you are going to read. In my case, I read as much as I can but pay most attention to the top ones – and I’d love to have my work there, because I think I’d be in good company.
If you find that on average the papers you read in specialist journals of impact 2 are better than those in Nature, then those are the journals you are going to read.
I don’t see anything like that. For my personal interests and my field, there simply doesn’t seem to be any noticeable correlation in either direction. I have examples for worst and best papers in any journal irrespective of rank. Maybe this varies from field to field, but for me journal rank is completely useless as a filter for scientific quality and the available data seem to support that notion. As you rightfully point out, it may filter other things quite well, granted, but these are more of entertainment rather than scientific value, though.
OK, we can agree to disagree. I see more mechanism in higher-impact journals, and when I don’t have a mechanism, I don’t try to submit there. I’m sure it’s just a difference in fields. And it’s just one woman’s experience.
Thanks, Jenny – I agree, of course 😉
I’m sure it’s just a difference in fields
I think you’ve nailed it. See also the comments about JBC, above. (In fact, there’s a huge field/discipline difference in citation traditions, which is part of the reason the IF is not always appropriate.)
@Richard: add to that that in some fields (such as mine) the lag time before publication of an accepted article can exceed 2 years, thus exceeding the IF measurement time…
For the British audience, the fact that the citation traditions are so different in different fields, and the relation between IF and journal hierarchy so disputed, highlights some of the more obvious difficulties with producing systems to grade individual academics, and ultimately their institutions, by “metrics” of some kind. The fact that the gradings determine institutional funding makes it all rather a time bomb.
The Research Assessment Exercise system used in the UK ober the last 25 yrs to determine University research block funding has hardly been popular, but its basis in some kind of peer review via subject panels has meant that the different traditions of different fields, both in science and elsewhere, were at least taken account of. Whether one can do that as easily, or as well, using baskets of statistics rather than groups of people to do the judging is likely to be a big question in the UK over the next half-decade.
That’s interesting, Bart – not having enough time for citations to clock up. I wonder if some sort of IF variant based on a 5 year cycle would be more useful?
Well, I regularly cite publications from the early 1980s. To include such termporal dimensions into the IF cycle would make it utterly useful for other fields (back to Jenny & Richard’s point).
Maxine, I know this has has happened at least twice from the same individual; not done in a mean way, but basically telling the editor that the reviewers are wrong/misguided, that the editor should know better but doesn’t, and that the journal should deeply desire having his paper in their journal. Not an urban myth at all. Of course this rarely happens and many papers end up rejected anyways.
Regarding destination of paper, forget impact factor or any other measure. The fact is, as Jenny points out, some of the best science is up in those journals (although certainly not more mechanism, as papers from a recent hot field has illustrated), and this is why they are highly regarded, and why we want to publish there. There is a hierarchy, but I do believe it is paid too much attention.
Re. Bart’s point about “life-time”, one of the points that the “top of specialist category” journals in my own field (physiology) used to make was that both J Physiol and J Gen Physiol (generally the two top ones) had very long citation half-lives, something like 7-8 yrs. Of the journals I have personally published in (and I’ve never been to the IF > 10 category) J Physiol is the one where the referees were most “technical”/in-depth, and J Gen Physiol had a similar reputation.
But is anyone really interested in how well a journal (or even a researcher) was doing 5, 10, 20 years ago?
I don’t think that’s the point, is it, Richard? With reference to individual people, if you are looking at what someone has done “over a time window” – which I think most would regard as fairer than a one-time-point off snapshot – it is obviously relevant if their papers are still being cited 5-6 years later, as opposed to being cited 10 times in the first year after they are published and then never again.
I’m sure it is (again) “field-dependent”, but something that people are still citing 10 yrs on is one of the ways I would think you could spot a “significant” piece of work. Obviously that does means it is easier to spot them with hindsight.
Someone needs to come up with a better algorithm.
(_sits back and files nails_)
ha ha !!
My lips are sealed.
But is anyone really interested in how well a journal (or even a researcher) was doing 5, 10, 20 years ago?
Vaguely. It’s interesting how things go. When Human Mutation first appeared, I don’t think anyone took it seriously. It’s not a bad place to publish, these days. Similarly, NAR at one time was seen as a dumping ground for dodgy methods papers, but is now rather a good read.
It’s somewhat useful to know these things when you’re looking over someone’s CV… a paper in Nature in 1986 was probably just as prestigious as one in 2010. The same is certainly not true of some other journals.
What I mean is, past citation record is no indicator of future performance. I think when employing someone (or looking for a lab to go to) you’re more interested in what’s happening now-ish, than in whether what they did ages ago is still being cited.
Mmm. I see. Agreed.
I wonder if some sort of IF variant based on a 5 year cycle would be more useful?
The impacts of papers in ecology and evolution are sometimes measured after five years. This is because work in these fields takes longer; the participants are more widely scattered, in location and in precise subject area; there is generally less competition; and because the practitioners take time to get it right before submitting anything, leaving editors having to salvage something useful from the literary equivalent of hyena entrails..
[ducks]
RPG
Impact factor does come in 5 year cycles now. Imaginatively they have called it the 5 year impact factor. In sleep it correlates extremely closely with the normal 2 year impact factor and is essentially a meaningless extra metric.
Maybe in archeology they need a 50 year IF though?
Or perhaps it should be measured in geological epochs. Then we could have a research assessment exercise once every ice age.
In other news the Australian NHMRC (MRC or NIH equivalent) has issued the following advice to applicants this year.
NHMRC no longer intends to use the impact factor of journals as a part of its assessment processes. Therefore, the impact factor of each publication should not be included
Further explanation of NHMRC’s decision to cease using impact factors of journals can be found at:
http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/about/senior_staff/articles/journal_impact_factors.pdf
Rilly? That’s brilliant.
But more importantly they still serve pints at the Rose.
OMG, I’ve been to the Rose! My sister lived across the street when she was in Sydney!
Wait, that wasn’t what I came to talk about at all.
If you have an hour or six to spare, there is an interview with Cameron Neylon here in which at one point he addresses data repositories as alternative to publishing papers, and says:
And that’s just it, though. You have to be really securely far into your career to even be in the position to decide whether or not (and where) to publish. And if a PI were to say “I’m not publishing papers” (at all, or in a particular jounal) you can bet that her/his PhD students and postdocs will cry “But I NEED this publication! And your name NEEDS to be ON IT or I will NEVER get the recognition I deserve!”
So then you’re left with a very tiny pool of tenured researchers who have no motivated PhD students or postdocs. They can publish whatever and wherever they want, but…what are they publishing at all if there is nobody in their lab doing the work?
I think you just described me, Eva.
I will be sure to use Cameron N’s argument the next time I get dragged into an
interrogationpersonal development review and asked why I’m not publishing more.Spot on, Eva. But surely Cameron must realize that every paper has a young lead author – so how can he keep up that stance?
We’ve come full circle back to the revolution complete with disposable martyrs during the bloody transition.
Not every field requires the PI to list his name as an author. Junior scholars in those fields can publish for the benefit of the lab, while the PI may freely choose not to publish anymore.
That’s good to know, thanks. But many fields do have that requirement, so they are still left with the same problem.
I always knew I was in a field with traditionalist tendencies. I handed in a grant proposal today which required a handwritten supplement…
With double-blind peer review – why would the PI name matter? I know, I know… it does…. But to be honest, I do not think that senior scientists or scholars should stop publishing. They have overarching perspectives to offer which PhD students or beginning postdocs cannot produce themselves, while simultaneously needing them to integrate their own tiny fragment of inquiry into the world, into the remainder of inquiry into the world.
Instead of publishing more or less, PI’s should publish differently: a genre-switch…
I think it is fair to put the PI’s name on papers issuing from his/her lab in the biomedical/molecular sciences. The boss has provided the overarching strategy and hypotheses, is providing all of the infrastructure and most if not all of the funds and supervises the research. The research simply cannot be done without the lab head’s support (and usually, cash).
@Jenny: I am perfectly aware that most labs work that way.
Just for contrast, I included a single article from our department’s code of conduct (yes, we have one just for ourselves):
Original:
Voor auteurschap gelden de Vancouver Guidelines. Medeauteurs dienen een substantiële bijdrage te leveren, begeleiding, meelezen, acquisitie onderzoeksgelden of eindverantwoordelijkheid voor onderzoeksprogramma’s is op zichzelf geen basis voor medeauteurschap. Erkenning geschiedt in dat geval via acknowledgements.
Translated:
Authorship is granted according to the Vancouver Guidelines. Coauthors are required to make a substantial contribution; suppervision, reading and commenting on drafts, aquisition of research funds or formal responsibility for the research programme are no basis for coauthorship. Recognition in those cases is confined to the acknowledgements.
Wow, that’s amazing! I am trying hard to imagine a world when this could happen in my field, and am failing miserably. 🙂
I wonder if there are any branches of physical sciences where this happens. It’s sort of liberating, to think that your work really is your own.
Bart – that seems ironic. The Netherlands is one of those countries where placing a head of department or division on a paper seems de rigueur, even if he/she did absolutely nothing to contribute.
Not to dump on the Netherlands specifically, but I’ve seen this many times… other countries too of course. Seems to be a European phenomenon, but I may be wrong.
@Richard: I know. I’ve worked in quite a few labs where no paper left the lab without the PI’s name on it. It is indeed considered normal and some department heads end up with publication lists over 700 papers long.
The discussion above highlighted that this custom is very much different in different disciplines. In mine (science studies), not including the dept. head is normal. In Dutch molecular biology, virology, etc. including the dept. head is normal.
Our department is part of the Science Faculty and is the only one which adheres to the code of conduct quoted above. Luckily our director is perfectly capable of writing his own papers without the aid of PhD students or postdocs.
I also see it as a discipline thing. My philosophy friends would NEVER publish with their supervisor’s name on the paper, and my phsyics friends only if they actually did something, but very often they have single author papers. And that’s in 3 or 4 different countries (Canada, US, Switzerland, Holland)
(Oh, now it looks like I can’t count. the CH/NL people were one and the same, just working in 2 countries.)
Presence of names on publications is clearly very cultural (both location and discipline). I remember hearing that authors from elsewhere were included on a biology paper from Manchester because they had provideed some crucial thing/marker/tracer/whatsit that was essential for the experiment but they had not been involved in the project otherwise and may have never even seen the paper prior to submission. I was told that this was normal. In the physical sciences they would probably have got an acknowledgement.
On the other hand, in reaaly “big science” projetcs, e.g. accelerator experimental particle physics, the detector team are included even if they could not identify or work with the results.
In my group, I include my name if I am involved in the legwork(less so these days unless it is a calculation), interpretation or writing. if, for example, someone writes a review and I do nothing other than correct the grammar, I would not expect my name to be included. If I am invited to give a presentation at a meeting, I will include the complete team in the authorship with the main contributor first.
However, sometimes people can be unreasonable, we asked to use some software and one author insisted that his/her name be second on any papers produced, wheras the second author of the software, who had done the most recent updates, did not want his/her name included on the author list. we have since found many errors in the software that call into question its usefulness.
Finally, I am reminded of a multiauthor paper published in nature many years ago where there was a foot note to the author list that stated “Author order was determined by a squash tournament”.
Brian, that’s a wonderful story about the squash tournament! And I really love that idea, because if it was one of my papers I’d definitely end up in last place which – in molecular biology – is reserved for the king of the castle!
“Author order was determined by a squash tournament”
Absolute brilliance!
I think there’s a definite distinction (caveat regarding differences between disciplines fully accepted) between “lab supervisor” and “departmental Chair who wouldn’t know the work it it bit him/her in a private place”. The former should always be on the paper in my little corner of the biological sciences; the latter, never. In my humble but most important opinion, natch. 😉
Jenny – where ya bin? I was beginning to worry.
Where’ve I been? My home internet went down last week (there’s a blog post in there somewhere) and for the past few days I’ve been on departmental retreat at the Sanger Centre. Yes, I have an iPhone, but NN pages take ages to load and when the comment threads are long, scrolling to the bottom is a five-minute exercise in ridiculous-looking finger sweeping. (Reminder to self: request ‘jump to bottom of thread’ button at top of all blogs in the New World Order)
Also, I understand some sort of hurricane blew through involving people who were obviously not raised by my parents.
When I was in a Dutch lab I used a bit of normal tissue scrounged up by one of the clinical co-authors and I had to put him AND his department head on the paper. To his credit, the department head did actually bother to read my manuscript. His sole comment? “I do not approve of the use of the word ‘material’ in regards to our tissue.” Not wanting to subject him to a lesson on native English, I just changed the offending word.
Ah, the Sanger Centre. I do rather like the place.
And yes, you can safely ignore the 145 comments on Henry’s posts, most of which concern those people that your parents didn’t raise.