High Impact made by famous ones
universal research
Sunday, 07 October 2007 16:24 UTC
I was wondering how much weightage does editors of high impact journals give to papers containing names of established scientists compared to those that don’t have them in the initial screening before sending to peer review. After seeing some of the recent papers with same/similar data and conclusion ending up in journals with considerable differences in impact factor I get this feeling. So does famous and established scientists can coax the editors of big journals to send their papers for peer review compared from those of less famous ones?
-
Replies
Jump to resultsResults
-
Chris and Angela have both written excellent accounts of the editorial processes involved. I would like to focus on one point in my response:
To underscore what Angela writes: editors of one journal will not know what has been submitted to other journals. They do search for similar material that has been published, but will not be able to find instances of duplicate publication if the duplicate has not actually been published.
Nature journals have very strict policies about this, here for duplicate publication, and here for plagiarism, due credit, and fabrication.
When a paper is submitted to a Nature journal, the author has to include copies of any papers submitted elsewhere, in confidence to the editors, so the editors can judge the level of the advance on the author’s other work. If it turned out after publication that an author had not done this and had published a significantly overlapping paper elsewhere, we would take action. We might withdraw the paper or publish a correction, in which case the original would be “marked” as such in database searches and so on.All this having been said, Chris’s points about judgement calls are correct, and for example the silver-gold distinction mentioned here might be considered “salami slicing” in one person’s opinion but not in another person’s. The editor is very well placed to make decisions about the degree of a scientific advance in a submitted paper, as she or he is reading so many of them in the field, as well as interacting with scientists in that community. It is the core of the editor’s job, to make these assessments, then to seek advice from peer-reviewers, and then to revise those assessments in light of that, perhaps in discussion with colleagues.
-
Dear Maxine
Thanks for your expert comments and referring to the editorial “Salami slicing”… I had somehow missed this beautiful editorial before… I have no doubt about the capability of the editors in terms of making editorial decisions. They are definitely among the bests in their fields and their decisions are well-justified.
However, my major concern was about the phenomenon of “Returning Favourism” (for their personal interests), which I am not yet fully convinced. This is probably because I see people around me (again some of the extremely elite scientists) returning favours to each other, when it comes to funding and approval of grants – these people are chairing most of the funding bodies and few of them are editors as well. I am not sure, whether this is true in editorial and reviewing process as well (atleast with few of them)? But so far everybody above said a big “NO”, when I asked so… This is an “integrity” issue and probably just another curiosity for a young researcher like me…. Hopefully, I would be able to fish out this fact myself one day or another…! But again, more insight in this matter by experienced people like most of you would be highly appreciated !!!
-
This is in continuation to my previous posting… I have an additional question here.. As far as I know, editors of Wiley-VCH journals have independent positions (I mean, Wiley editors are not into academic research and they have only editorial responsibilties). I was wondering, whether the editors of NPG journals too have independent editorial roles like those of Wiley-VCH editors?
. -
To answer your question Vipul, yes, all of the NPG journals are staffed by full-time editors. We do not have external ‘competing’ research interests that might be viewed as swaying or biasing our view on manuscripts submitted to the journal. The masthead of each journal lists who we are and on the journal websites you can even find blurbs of our research backgrounds prior to transitioning to the editors desk. So the research community knows who we are.
As indicated abundantly in previous replies in this forum, we base our manuscript decisions on the novelty of the work, the potential interest of the work to a large segment of the research community and the extent of the conceptual advance provided in the new work. It is not by ‘who’ is on the author list. It is an extremely fair system.
-
The Nature journal editors are professional editors employed by Nature Publishing Group. They are subject to the code of ethics of NPG which is outlined in our competing interests policies and are also expected to declare any perceived interest to the journal.
NPG also publishes journals for various scientific societies- the editors who are answering questions in this forum are Nature journal editors so can’t speak for the practices in those other NPG journals- though NPG employs some professional executive editors for these journals, my understanding is that the content is decided upon by academic editors on a board who are practicing scientists.On your other point, Vipul, yes, the scientific community is networked in the sense you say, just as is the case for any professional community. But so far as publishing in journals is concerned, the Nature journals are independent. For example, if someone submits a paper and we send it for peer-review, we will ensure that the reviewers are not colleagues or regularly publish together. We will not send that author’s next submission to the same peer-reviwers as we did for his or her last paper. When we receive manuscripts from authors that have been revised in response to peer-review, we show the peer-reviewers the revised mansucript and all the reports, so that if there is unfairness in one report, one of the other peer-reviewers can point it out. These are only a few of the ways in which our editors ensure that the manuscripts that are submitted are treated fairly. (Our peer review policies are here.) At the end of the day, what the editors are looking for are exciting results, some of them do not even look at the authors’ names until they have read the paper! The quality of a journal rests on the research it publishes and how good that is (because the best research is discussed, cited and built upon), rather than on how “important” the authors are who have published in the journal.
-
For those of you interested in the duplicate papers question/issue, there’s a good discussion about it going on here in the Publishing in the New Millennium forum.
-
Laurie and Maxine !
Whatever both of you say makes perfect sense to me. I reckon that appointment of “full-time editors” in Nature-journals might be one of the significant factors in providing NPG journals an edge over other publishing groups.Since Editors of few other publishing groups are currently pursuing research in academia as well, I was not so sure, how well they can keep their editorial responsibilities separated from their personal interests.. -
Vipul – the issues you have raised are complex, and I hope my colleagues have put some of your fears to rest. But I’d like to turn one of these things around.
One of your questions (for your question was really several, interlinked ones) was whether journals play favorites by giving an easier ride to well-known authors or groups. However, one thing that does happen as a Nature editor is that some authors who are well-known, or perceive themselves to be, or have a track record of high-impact publication, sometimes think that they deserve special treatment for these reasons, irrespective of the quality of their current submission, and perhaps because of their familiarity with editors and the publication process. They are sometimes very surprised (and shocked) to learn that their nth submission to Nature will be judged by precisely the same criteria that are used to judge the debut submission by a graduate student.
I wish to name no names, but I, at least, can think of academics who no longer submit to Nature – and do not trouble to hide the fact – because Nature has turned down one of their papers. I remember well when I first joined Nature, back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and the then-editor John Maddox told me “Henry: in this job you will make enemies.”
-
Henry – I understand that I had many queries at the same time, since I could not avoid linking the beads together. However, it is also true that after hearing responses from all of you experts, I am convinced to a greater extent that there is a fair degree of transparency in the system. Moreover, after hearing about the John Maddox’s statement from you “Henry: in this job you will make enemies”, I am much convinced about the system. I am also appreciative of the fact that the people like you are willing to even make enemies, while pursuing your professional duties… Thanks for keeping the system clean !
Results
-
