Being rejected by a journal may not be such a bad thing, says a survey published in Science.
The study, according to an article in The Scientist, found that a paper is more likely to be cited more often if it is resubmitted to another journal. It also found that papers that were submitted more than once tended to be published in journals with lower impact factors than the previous journal, with only a small fraction of resubmitted papers going to journals with higher impact factors.
The researchers postulate that one reason this might be happening is because the papers go through multiple rounds of peer review and revision, the article says.
In any case, Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the study, says in The Scientist that the results suggest that "it really behooves people to more actively shop their papers around."
It also behooves editors to hang on to manuscripts, says Vincent Calcagno, an evolutionary biologist and ecologist at the Institute for Agricultural Research and a co-author on the study.
"When a journal has invested work and time from experts to make comments … it would be beneficial for that publisher or publishing group not to let the manuscript go to another competing publisher who will benefit from the improvements," he tells The Scientist.
These results were based on responses from 80,000 researchers, out of a pool of 200,000, who published papers across 16 fields between 2006 and 2008.
For many years I have kept in
For many years I have kept in my office in a prominent position a copy of the letter dated 11.6.1937 from the editor of 'Nature' rejecting the paper by Hans Krebs on his Citric Acid Cycle, saying that they 'had already sufficient letters to fill the correspondence columns of Nature for seven or eight weeks.'
This gave me the confidence in the instances to resubmit to another journal a paper that had just been rejected. Ultimately all my papers were published.
We have an occasional
We have an occasional "journey to publication" club as an alternative to the usual journal club. Authors describe the paper as originally submitted, reviewers and editors comments and what changed in the final paper accepted. It is often an eye-opening presentation, but most papers really do improve during the publication process.
However I do wonder if pushing for a year (in some cases) to get into the highest impact factor journal is really a good use of so many bright peoples time? Once the story is complete shouldn't we be pushing them to get the next story out ASAP? The problem is that only one or two papers are the basis for most post-docs to get their first independent group leader position so the pressure is on to aim high.