Today I spent part of the afternoon at the Nature booth that the company has set up here at the meeting. Lots of people dropped by, some to chat about their interest in getting involved in editing, others to talk about their papers, and still others with general questions about the way things work behind the scenes. One question I get asked a lot is whether there is any way to tell if a paper that you’ve just written is something that Nature Neuroscience would be interested in publishing. I can certainly rattle off a list of traits that tend to characterize papers published in high profile journals, but I don’t know how helpful that is. One thing that has become clear to me in my own experiences writing papers, and in talking to authors, is that it is extremely difficult to objectively evaluate one’s own work. When you’ve spent a year or two conducting experiments and then writing them up, it is quite hard to step back and get a sense of how important or interesting the work is to a broad audience. Partially because of this, we do offer authors the option of submitting a Presubmission Inquiry to gauge the journal’s interest in a potential submission. This is easy to do, but the effectiveness of this depends critically on writing a useful description of the work. Quite often authors will describe the work in very abstract terms, or mainly describe the conclusions that they have drawn from the work, rather than what experiments were conducted. The most useful thing for an editor is to get a concise description of the science that was done, as well as it’s motivation and a brief statement of what is learned from it. For us to give useful feedback about whether the work is likely to be appropriate for the journal, the abstract should not be too abstract.

The evening brought the annual MIT Picower party. This year it was held at a large club in the Midtown area of Atlanta, and was totally packed. I would say there were well upwards of 1000 people in attendance, talking, drinking and dancing. Attendance was tilted towards the younger end of the SFN attendee spectrum, but there were quite a few faculty in attendance as well. When I left at around 1 things showed no signs of slowing down…