Getting a peer-review

Peer review is the ultimate filter a manuscript has to pass before publication in a scholarly journal as an academic paper. Not all manuscript submitted to a journal are sent to peers for review, however.

Desk rejections

According Dr. Goldman and Huck, the top reasons for desk rejections are:

1. Paper out of scope for the journal. Sometimes way out of scope.
2. Manuscript based on theories that are so old and outdated that they are judged neither relevant nor worthy of the time of peer-reviewers.
3. Not really a scientific paper.
4. More than enough in the literature already. The manuscript is not adding anything new to the literature, just summarizing what is already known.

Dr. Goldman emphasized that not all journals require the same level of novelty, nor should they. Consider negative results and replications. They are invaluable to newcomers to the field, so they can get a fuller grasp of what is known and what is unknown, and so they do not repeat the mistakes of the scientists before them. They are essential for literature reviews, and especially critical in the medical fields [as a publication bias in favor of positive results can be misinterpreted as the overwhelming confirmation of a finding that does not actually replicate and a publication bias against replications can disincentivize replications allowing initial results to stand untested and unchallenged]. But do negative results and replications get published in journals requiring novelty?

Journal differences

Huck and Goldman mentioned five differences between journals:

1. High impact journals may require novelty, to filter out vast number of submissions.
2. Limits on the length of manuscripts vary between journals.
3. Journals receive varying numbers of manuscripts, and reject different rates of those manuscripts.
4. Style guides and author instructions differ between journals. Goldman has shortened her author instructions over the decades.
   4.1. In special, free format vs. fixed format. Some journals require the manuscript, including citations and references, to adhere to the journal style guide before peer-review, whereas others allow significant formatting to happen after review. This can enable authors submitting a manuscript rejected in one journal to a second journal without modification for style differences between journals.
5. Scope.

Revise & resubmit

The editors in the panel of the former day of Pubathon classified the issues they have with manuscript, and the studies they document, into fixable and unfixable issues based on the estimated effort needed to resolve each of the issue.

Unfixable issues:

1. Incorrect data collection or a mistake in the study or the study design.

Fixable issues:

1. Conclusions not grounded in the data or data analysis incorrect.
2. Presentation shoddy.
3. Poor writing, including bad English.
4. Unstructured.
5. Sentences or fragments copied from elsewhere.

Even when a journal requests a correction of a fixable issues, author can and do refuse to respond with a revised manuscript. This can be due to a disagreement on whether the issue can be remedied, because the author has decided not to spend the time needed to revise the manuscript, or even a disagreement on whether the submission contains a mistake at all!

Language

Journals are going to spend a week on copyediting your manuscript (including the title) after peer-review.

But bad language is going to make reviewers enjoy reading your manuscript less, and, unfortunately, like your manuscript less.

You can definitely use a fresh pair of eyes. Have a fluent English speaker who knows the subject read the manuscript before submission.

 

Plagiarism

The panels mentioned that plagiarism was becoming less of a problem. The did, however, note that copied illustrations, either verbatim or modified, were commonly seen in submitted manuscripts. That the authors submitting such plagiarsim frequently used the excuse that a third party prepared the manuscript for them.

Final advice:

1. Really read the author instructions.
2. Read recent articles published in the journal.
3. Do not hesitate to ask the editor if the instructions are unclear.
4. If it is your first time submitting a manuscript, collect and submit all information that you think may be relevant.

Cover letters are not necessary. A cover letter that motivates why this manuscript should be published will make the job of the editor quicker. This may include contact details of the co-authors and text combined a cover letter. The journal might have a structured submission form for all that information, in which case you copy the information from the cover letter into the form and do not have to submit the cover letter itself