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Are presubmission enquiries useful?
Maxine Clarke
Wednesday, 28 May 2008 14:10 UTC
William Burns writes in the Good Paper Journal Club
“I’ve heard people say it’s always best to put in a pre-submission enquiry before you submit a paper. Obviously it saves time – you don’t have to write the whole thing first, only to find the journal didn’t want it anyway.
And it also lets you organize your ideas a little more coherently before you set off on the adventure of writing the actual paper.
But does it increase your chances of acceptance? Will the journal’s editors take more notice of you if they already know your name from pre-submission emails (or phone calls)?
Any views on the value of presubmission enquiries?”
Updated 28 May 2008 14:14 UTC
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Replies
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My reply to this question is in the Good Paper Journal Club forum.
To summarise from the point of view of the Nature journals: the editors always prefer the entire manuscript to be submitted, rather than a presubmission enquiry, even if the full manuscript is not in the correct format for the journal.
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Nature Protocols might be one exception where the pre-sub enquiry may save a lot of time.
This mostly stems from the fact that our protocols need to be based on methods that have already been used in primary research articles. We can frequently judge whether we are interested (and what bits we are most interested in) and whether we have the resources to process the resulting protocol from these parent articles.
People sometimes also suggest protocols that are novel! And it is useful to let them know that they should publish the primary research first as this will influence the type of information that they would include in the protocol.(I agree, though, that the situation where you later end up rejecting the prepared protocol is rather upsetting all round.)
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Maxine’s post reflects the views of most editors at Nature journals. From our perspective, it’s often difficult to arrive at a satisfactory decision based only on an abstract of 150 words!
For submissions of full papers, editors are pretty good at providing a quick editorial assessment of a paper (whether it will be sent to review), so it often is faster to send in the full paper rather than go through a presubmission inquiry, which will take a few days, followed by a full submission process, which will add more time.
However, I do think that a presubmission inquiry can be useful when you aren’t clear on whether the study falls within the scope of the journal. If you provide a good summary of the paper highlighting the central research question, the results, and the conclusions/implications the editors should be able to tell you whether it’s a good fit for the journal.
If you do decide to submit a presubmission inquiry, here are a few tips.
1. Make the abstract and comments as informative as possible. Maybe instead of thinking of this as formal abstract write it as if you were summarizing the project in a conversation at your lab or a conference.
2. It’s not worth arguing about matters of scope. If the editors have concluded that the paper falls outside the remit of the journal, then it’s best to take it elsewhere.
3. If the editorial team expresses interest in the paper but raises concerns or presents editorial criteria for your area of research, take them to heart. If you have additional data or information, include it in the full submission. We are happy to provide guidance so you also can contact the editor to discuss the paper before submission.
4. If you already have the paper written, just skip the presubmission inquiry and submit the full paper!
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