Speaker 1: Good morning everybody and thank you very much for inviting me to talk. My name is Pippa Smart and I'm an independent publishing and research communication consultant. I normally work with editorial groups and with publishers on a whole variety of issues. But one thing that I am particularly aware of is that when you submit an article to a journal, it can be considered a little bit of a black box. I'm an editor-in-chief of a journal myself called Learned Publishing and I deal with a lot of authors who don't understand why it takes a long time for their article to go through the process and sometimes don't understand the decision that they get at the end. And so I'm hoping that this presentation will make it a little bit clearer. So opening up the black box, I'm going to talk about first what happens at submission and to try and explain why things can take so long and sometimes why things happen too quickly. And then the second part of this talk is going to look at very briefly how you can improve acceptance success. So what you can do to make sure that articles are not rejected and to understand the reasons that will make an editor accept an article so that you can plan for that. So firstly to start with what happens at submission. I have a little diagram here that is hopefully quite confusing. It confused me to try and draw it. So on submission, the author has finished the article, thinks it is absolutely fantastic and the best thing they have ever written. They send it through the online submission system and then what happens then? It's first of all received in the editorial office. The people working in the editorial office here are sometimes called the managing editor, sometimes assistant editor, sometimes editorial assistant. It can be a whole range of titles. And their job is to check the submission for completeness, for initial suitability and they'll quite often do a plagiarism check at this point as well. So completeness is checking that the references are there, that the author has supplied all their contact details, that all the names of the authors have been supplied, that if the text says figure 1, 2, 3, 4, that there actually is a figure 1, 2, 3 and 4. They'll also check for initial suitability. So if it's a life sciences journal and they get an article on knitting patterns in the Midwest, they'll know that that can be immediately rejected. So that's the kind of basic checks that will happen and these tend to happen quite quickly. After the first checks, the article is passed virtually to the editor-in-chief or here just called the editor. He's the cool guy with the dark shades. And either it'll be sent to the editor directly or it'll be sent to a handling editor who'll sometimes be called an assistant editor, an associate editor, a deputy editor. We're not very good on terminology in journal publishing and we have a variety of names for the same duties. So if the editorial office send the article to the editor-in-chief, the editor has basically two choices. The first choice is immediate rejection and the second choice is it looks okay, I can send it out for review. Two basic choices. I'll come back to reject in a few minutes. If it's sent to a handling editor, it might be sent directly from the editorial office or it might go via the editor-in-chief. So with my own journal, I am my editorial office so I send the article to myself and then I make the decision reject or okay for review. But sometimes I'll send an article to one of my associate editors and it'll be specifically because that article is well within their area of knowledge and skill and outside mine. So it'll be up to them to make that initial decision, reject or it's okay to send to review. Why does immediate rejection happen? Well it's quite common. It's probably more common than you would expect. With the high impact journals like Science or Nature, they will reject over 70% of submissions immediately. Now by immediately, that's probably within the first week. It takes about a week for them to get through the initial checks. But that's 70% of articles that never get sent for peer review. Now the reason they don't is either because they're out of scope. Sometimes they don't fit the journal so they're just outside what the journal wants to publish. An example is that although they've changed slightly, the BMJ used to have a standard criteria which was that they would only publish articles that were of use and relevance to a UK general practitioner. Now that might mean that you would submit a most fantastic medical research article but if they didn't feel it was of use to a UK GP, it would be rejected immediately. So they had very specific criteria. This has changed but that just shows you the focus that a journal can have. So sometimes the fit isn't quite right. Sometimes the fit is also the article type. So it might be a long review article but the journal doesn't publish long review articles. Now the high impact journals like Science, Nature, Cell will also be looking for novelty. So if the journal editor receives an article which is the same research that's been done 20 times over, they won't bother because even though it's a good article, they don't want replicative science in their journal. That doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the science. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the article. It's just not suitable for that particular journal. And they can make that decision before it goes to review. Plagiarism, fraud, of course. At any point at which that gets identified, that is cause for immediate rejection and that can happen right at the beginning. And also missing parts or sometimes style. Again, some of the very high quality journals, if the article has not been presented in exactly their style template, they'll reject it. The lower quality journals, and I say quality advisedly, perhaps I should say the lower impact factor journals, are more willing to accept an article to review and then worry about the style later. And in fact Elsevier particularly promotes this. It says don't worry about the style. Let us judge the quality of content and if that's okay, we can get the style right. But the quality of content is all important. But some journals will reject for missing parts. And I mentioned, I said lower quality. PLOS One has a lower impact factor and it's the biggest journal in the world with a relatively low overall rejection. Its rejection in total is only about 50%. But even that journal rejects about 30% before it gets out to review. And the reason it's high is that editors don't want to bother reviewers with rubbish articles. There's no point. It's a waste of their time. So they try to clear out as many as possible before it gets through to review. So your article has got through to review. You're one of the lucky 70%. What happens then? Well, the reviewers of course have to be selected from a database, online search, from references, from members of the editorial board. Sometimes they will use the author-supplied reviewers, although it's very bad practice to use only author-supplied reviewers. Normally only one or two of these will be used. Sometimes none of them will be used because the editorial office or the editor decides that they don't want to use the people that the author has suggested. They want to use other people. Now the problem here lies in finding reviewers. Standard practice is that an article is reviewed by three people. But to get three people to agree, particularly in certain areas, like biomedical is one of the areas, you can easily invite eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve reviewers until you get three people agree. This all takes time. And then when they do agree, normally they're given two weeks. I've said here they're frequently late. I was going to write they're always late, but I thought I wouldn't just in case there was a reviewer looking at this video. So they're frequently late. Reviewers tend to put their reviews in right at the last minute. It's human nature. We all do it. They can easily take twice the length of time they're actually given. So editorial offices have to regularly remind them and ask them and chivvy them along to send in the reviews faster. But you do get to a point when you have to make a decision in the editorial office or the editor about inviting someone else. And again, you then need to give them another two weeks and then they're probably going to be late as well. And then when you finally do get the reviewer comments, they can be contradictory. I frequently get two reviews. One says fantastic article. Don't change a thing. And the other review says absolutely rubbish. The methodology is flawed. Don't touch it with a barge pole. Don't publish it. So as an editor, what do you do if you get contradictory reports? Not only contradictory, you can frequently get totally unhelpful reviews. A review saying there are problems. Yeah, it would be nice if you as the reviewer told me what the problems were. They can easily misunderstand the article. We're all human after all. Reviewers are busy people. They read an article quickly, they can easily misunderstand it. Or they may discover after accepting the review that actually they have a conflict of interest. They may have worked in the same lab as the authors. They may be working on a similar drug or a similar subject. And in which case if they have a conflict of interest, they have to declare it and decline to review. So someone else has to be asked. So you need further reviewers. You may need an extra reviewer to act as an arbitrator when you've got conflicting reviews. You may find that you didn't think you needed a statistical reviewer, but the reviewers have advised you that you do. So you need to go out to somebody else. And this all takes time. If you look at any of the surveys about how long reviewing takes, you'll normally find that it takes about 2, 3, 4 weeks. It doesn't. It takes considerably longer than that. So if you have a journal that can get you reviews to your articles within a month, that's a very efficient, well-run editorial office. It can be very difficult to get reviews, particularly if you're working in an area where there are not many people who are the peers, who are the researchers that know that subject suitably to review an article, and therefore they're asked very frequently. So it takes time. So when the reviews come in, the handling editor or the editor-in-chief makes a decision. There are basically only three decisions, accept, reject, or revision required. Accept is quite rare. In fact, very rare. It normally only happens with short opinion pieces or case studies. Reject is higher in the high-impact journals than it is in the lower-impact journals. What happens with the majority of articles is revision required. And the revision might be minor, major. It may ask for further analysis, for further experiments. So it can be quite substantial, the revision, but that's the more common response. So when the author has revised the article, and then they've resubmitted it, it's quite likely that the reviewing process starts all over again. So again, you've got another round of reviews to check that the corrections, the revisions, the further analysis, the further experiments have all been done appropriately. So again, you've got further delays at that point. There's a lot of quality control that goes into publications, and quality control takes time. So how do you improve the acceptance of your articles? The basics, read the author guidelines, check the journal scope, ensure that you are submitting your article to the right journal, and also make sure the article is the best that it possibly can be. The journal Diabetologia had some excellent guidelines for authors. These were not their formal instructions for submission, and a blog from the editor back in 2011 on why an article would be accepted and why it wouldn't. It's worth searching for this. It's not on their website anymore, but you can find it in certain archives. So if you search for the guidelines from Diabetologia in 2011, you'll find this. But the key four points made by the editor are nothing hides bad research, get it right. Also, the paper needs a message. We don't just want information, we want a message, we want a reason for the article. Also, make sure that the article has already been critically reviewed by colleagues, by the peers of the author themselves. He also advocates for diagrams. Try to illustrate articles rather than just put in straightforward text. And he also advocates for trying to reduce the article to make it as short as possible. And a very good tip there is once you've written an article, put it in a drawer, forget about it for at least two weeks, get it out, and then try and reduce it by 25%. And trust me, as an author myself, it works. The other thing, an excellent book called What Editors Want by Philippa Benson and Susan Silver, who are managing editors and journal editors who provide a lot of training courses for authors and editors, they say editors are not experts in every aspect that their journal publishes on, so the author needs to intrigue the editor. You need to effectively sell the article. And they said an article is attractive to the editors, it makes them want to read it, it communicates the message clearly, and it encourages citation, because all editors want people to cite the articles that they publish. The other interesting point is that short articles tend to be more likely to be accepted, to be read, and to be cited. However, a very interesting blog recently came out in Ars Technica called Scientific Publishers are Killing Research Papers. Although the author says, yes, short direct articles have become more prestigious, she also goes on to say they've also become more like a sales pitch. And this is copied from the Ars Technica blog. She said an article should basically say, look at this cool thing we did. This is how we did it. This is the cool thing. This is the results. Wasn't that cool? That is the perfect article. But she said what's happening is people are going, look at this cool thing. It's really cool. It's really, really cool. They're overselling it. This is how we did it, apart from the bit we forgot. This is the cool thing. And I particularly like that last thing. This thing we did is not only cool, but is totally going to cure cancer, even though the paper was nothing to do with cancer and was actually about the ecology of the lesser spotted physicist. So what she said here, and this is a very valid point, an article should have a message, but if you need to oversell it, you've got a problem with the article. And very interesting, at the European Association of Science Editor Strasbourg conference, there was a speaker from the Lancet. The Lancet employ several editors who take the articles after they've been accepted and their main job is to go through the article and remove spin. So the Lancet actively go through articles to get rid of overblown claims. And if the Lancet are doing it, you can bet that other major journals are doing this as well. And if they have to do it, it will make an article more likely to be rejected because they want the article to be truthful and if you're making too many promises, there's a problem with it. So make sure your article has a message. This isn't the title, this is the rationale for writing the article. If it doesn't have a message, it's not worth publishing and a lot of journals will reject it. Also, write concisely. This is a Western thing. Western English assumes the reader doesn't know what you're talking about and effectively dumbs down the message. Now culturally, a lot of other cultures don't write like that and therefore you will get from non-native English speakers more convoluted text because culturally they will make the text much more formal and they will use much more sophisticated terminology than we tend to use in the UK and the USA. So you will tend to get statements like this whereas actually this same statement could be written just in six words. And the structure needs to be good. The structure is really what you should be using to sell the message. You shouldn't be making overbone claims. You should be structuring the article in such a way that the article speaks for itself but also sells its own message. So coming back to the reasons for rejection and again this is from What Editors Want which I highly recommend anybody to buy and I don't have shares in the publishing company. Wrong paper, wrong journal. Read the guidelines. Also a mismatch of quality. If you have second rate research, don't send it to the top rate journals. They will just reject it. And it's wasting your time, it's wasting the editor's time and it's wasting the reviewer's time. However, your article might get rejected because the journal has simply published too many articles on the same topic. This is unlucky. Sometimes you can tell this because if you go to a journal and basically it's had articles all on the same topic, go somewhere else. But sometimes you're just unlucky because you don't know what's going through. Sometimes it's because the article's badly written. Explain yourself more clearly. Remember you need to sell that article to the editor in the first instance so it isn't immediately rejected and to the reviewers in the second instance. And finally, flawed science. If the science is bad, don't even bother. You can normally get something out of it if the science is bad but don't bother with the research article because it will just get rejected. So final words. Editors are human. As a journal editor myself, I'm deeply flawed, extremely biased and very, very opinionated. I, as a journal editor, I want my journal to be the best and therefore I want the best articles I can possibly get. And as authors, as medical communications, as editors, you need to buy into that and you need to make sure that that editor considers your article to be the best and therefore to be publishable. And also to remember that reviewers, like editors, are normal, busy people. Generally they want to do the right thing but life gets in the way and there can be long delays. And the saying is, bad news takes time but good news travels quickly. If you get a quick message, if you get a quick decision, it is actually more likely to be negative. So if you are kept waiting, it's not always a bad thing. So thank you for listening.