As we finish up our 4th volume over at Nature Chemical Biology, we’ve been thinking about new ideas for the journal and new ways to follow up on some old ideas. We’ve also been getting some feedback recently that our decision letters (the ‘reject’, ‘accept’, or ‘somewhere in between’ emails) aren’t as clear as they could be. Our editorial this month tries to shed some light on this issue, but I also thought I would ask you guys a few questions:
What is the ideal way to find out your paper has been rejected, if there is such a thing? Does it help if we explain our thinking – what aspects of the paper we found stronger or weaker than others? Or would you rather just hear ‘no’ and move on?
If we ask you to call us to talk about the decision, would you? If we ask you to expand the paper prior to review, when would you be willing to do that vs. just go to another journal?
How much do you all know about the editorial process generally? Meaning, do we need to explain that we do a first round of editorial review, or is that obvious?
Do you have any questions about decisions that we could discuss here? We do want our decisions to be as transparent as possible, both so that potential authors and editors can exchange ideas and have a deep understanding of the various fields we cover, and because it should save a lot of time and energy if we can make our editorial processes and criteria plain. So, please ask, explain, instruct! We’re currently preparing the January issue, so we need some resolutions to work on.
Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)
In my opinion, the ideal way to point out why one paper was rejected is the list of what should be on that paper but they did not provide. It could be anything (results, experiments, or discussions)but it makes that paper much more complete and impact. However, this process take times and a lot of discussions, it might delay publication.
Having just gone through this with a NPG journal, a more detailed description of the initial review process with the editors would be appreciated. The catch-all “we don’t think it’s of broad interest for our readers” is not helpful. The only thing to do after that generic comment is to check recent publications in the journal to see if what was submitted was in fact narrower in scope. Unfortunately, if you find other articles that are more narrow and specific to a discipline, then it’s back to square one with no real idea why it was sent back.
It strongly depends on the motivation of editorial team. Do you wish all the authors of rejected papers would improve their research and come back? Do you have even more than enough submissions? Would you like to get rid of obviously weak manuscripts without wasting precious time of elite referees?
What would “ideal author” look like from your point of view?
Try to formulate your position first. Otherwise we are unable to suggest you anything novel beyond trivially known things.
Great questions, Valentin! Unfortunately I may not provide very helpful answers, as there are papers in all of these categories and more. Whether or not we want papers to come back depends primarily on why they were rejected – if the idea is interesting but needs more support, we would be very glad if the paper was resubmitted with more data. If the paper is not, as we see it, within the realm of chemical biology, then it probably is not a good use of time for it to be resubmitted. Others may be on a case-by-case basis.
And you’re definitely right that we try to make the most careful use of our referees (thus the prescreening idea in the first place), so that’s when we use this option of rejecting a paper but asking for resubmission (when we can provide clear feedback that is in line with what referees normally ask for or that would make the paper more appropriate for a chemical biology audience). I guess a big question on our minds is whether people are receptive to that idea – from what we’ve seen, some clearly are, but there are many papers that we never see again. What do you think?
Thanks, Catherine! As far as I remember most of discussions of manuscript rejections from a high impact journal sooner or later fall into one of these categories:
Ideas or quality are of minor concern. If the authors are not famous enough the manuscript is rejected.
The rejections like “the topic is not broad enough”, etc. are often interpreted in that way.
So, it is OK to carry out the first stage of editorial selection of the manuscripts, but it would be nice to make the authors sure that #1 is not the case.
Obviously, there is very limited number of highly qualified scientists. You ask them for advise and the other high impact journal does the same. It is one of the sources publications mainstream may come from.
Therefore, even if the manuscript is rejected, it would be nice to show to the authors that the editor may not agree with the referee in case of further improvements of the manuscript.
Most of the manuscripts are either by invitation or from the mainstream. The fraction of other accepted manuscripts is small and it is a lottery even for the best ones.
Thus, it would be nice to show that all the manuscripts, that meet certain easily understandable criteria, will be accepted.
From my experience, I have never encountered any of these with our manuscripts. If the manuscript was rejected, it was not good enough. There is always something useful in referees reports.
Anyway, I think it would be helpful to let you know different opinions on the subject. Do you think any of the cases above may to some extent happen in modern high impact journals?
I am a grad student and so will not probably be able to answer your questions. But instead i have a question for you regarding the editorial of Dec 2008 issue of NCB. I would like to know whats the approximate time taken by the editorial to make a decision (whether to send for review or not) on a submission, once an editor has been assigned?
thank you in advance…
Catherine, regarding the papers you never see again, the manuscripts I’ve worked on which were returned with “we’d like to see experiment X”-type comments have generally fallen into three categories:*
1) “Experiment X? That’s no problem! We’ll be able to turn the paper around in no time!”
2) “Experiment X? There’s no way we’re doing X!** What was our fall-back journal again?”
3) “Experiment X? If we have to go to the trouble to do X, we might as well try submitting to [slightly shinier journal B].”
I’d err in favor of telling us “Do experiment X”. Although we might choose to go elsewhere with the manuscript, just telling us “Sorry, no” ensures that we will.
*I’m not implying that any of these have happened specifically with Nature Chemistry or any of the other Nature family of journals.
**Due to time constraints, material constraints, departure of the person who could have actually done X, or just not wanting to extend the lab in that direction.
I think it may be easier to disagree this article.
Finally some time to answer these great questions! Sorry for the delay!
So, to Valentin:
1. Author names are almost completely irrelevant to our decision. I say ‘almost’ because sometimes we have talked to a potential author prior to submission of the manuscript (either at a conference or because they just randomly got in touch) and they were able to tell us why the paper was likely to be significant in a way that does not come through in either the cover letter or paper itself. So, we may take a bigger chance with these papers than with others of equal caliber (according to our editorial assessment). Our rejection letters would also probably be more informal in these cases, although I don’t know whether that is a good or bad thing. I should note that these people are not necessarily the ‘famous’ folks – we welcome interactions with anyone who has questions about the journal, or wants to talk to us about manuscripts, or whatever! I should also note (related to whether these people are privileged or not) that we sometimes have similar conversations with authors after a paper has been rejected – if it’s clear to them that we missed something significant about the manuscript, then it is worthwhile for them to get in touch with us and explain it. We’ve had (a few) papers that were initially rejected get published because there was something subtle that the editorial team had missed.
I agree that the statement ‘the topic is not of broad enough interest’ is unfortunate. As you imply, any big advance (in any field) will be of interest whether there are 3 people working in the field or 5000. We’re trying to make sure we don’t use that statement.
It’s hard for me to say anything about what other journals do. Like all scientists, I’m sure, we are curious sometimes as to how a particular paper got published in a particular journal (either it’s something we wouldn’t have guessed was a big enough advance to make it in, or the data don’t seem very complete to us, etc), but I guess they must have their reasons.
2. It is true that referees are a valuable commodity. We consciously try not to overwork our referees – we don’t contact someone within ~6 months after they have reviewed a paper for us. This can be frustrating when you know that a particular scientist is really an expert on a topic and you just got a new paper on that topic, but you’re very right that it’s important to get input from a lot of different people. The place where we get bamboozled the most is when we have referees that disagree with each other – sometimes it’s hard to figure out whose opinion ‘counts’ the most (sometimes this is resolved by getting back in touch with the referees to see if we can resolve any points of disagreement before we reply to the authors). In our decision letters, we also try to point out the parts of the referee comments that we placed the most weight on, either in deciding to reject the paper entirely or as to what issues need to be addressed for a revision. If we think some of the referee requests are beyond the scope of the paper, we will say that, or in the few cases where the referee was off base, we point that out to the author as well.
3. We actually do not invite manuscripts at all. We rely on the chemical biology community to decide they might like to publish a paper with us, and then everything goes from there. As a result, we definitely do not have the luxury of deciding we don’t want to review a paper just because it isn’t from ‘the mainstream’. We are limited in topic by what papers are submitted to us, which is a self-propagating cycle (people see GPCR papers in the journal, so they know we like GPCR papers, so they submit those). However, we consider our editorial scope to be much wider than what we typically publish. If you look at our research highlights, News & Views articles that highlight papers published elsewhere, and our other commissioned pieces, you may find that we’re interested in lots of topics. For example, we would love to be publishing more synthetic chemistry in the journal (as long as it has a biological goal or relevance of some kind), but we rarely receive those types of papers. If you aren’t sure if a paper is appropriate for a particular journal, you should definitely feel free to email the editors and ask in a few sentences whether X topic is something they would consider.
One thing that we’ve been trying to talk about in our editorials and at conferences recently is that we wish there was more open communication between editors and practicing scientists, as then these kinds of topics could be discussed more often.
Did that answer your questions?
And, to Robert:
The approximate time for Nature Chemical Biology is ~5-7 days. Sometimes we are caught up on all our work, and can get an answer out in 2-3 days; sometimes we are completely swamped with manuscripts, journal deadlines, travel, etc., and things can take a bit longer (7-10 days). Obviously we try to avoid being slow, as authors are understandably curious to hear back from us. What happens (again, at Nat Chem Bio) once we get a paper is that the ‘primary’ editor (the one you will actually email/talk with) reads it and makes a recommendation to the rest of the team. Other editors then also read the paper and offer their opinions. If the opinions diverge a lot, sometimes this also slows the process down by a day or so, because we need to talk about it some more.
I should add that if an author has ‘appealed’ our decision, it usually takes 7-14 days for us to get back to them, as these are given a second tier status in terms of our priorities.
I should also emphasize that this process seems to be extremely divergent from journal to journal! If you interact a lot with another journal, best to ask them directly. Or, any of you other editors could feel free to chime in.