There may be someone among us who has had this happen to him or her at some point or other: You embark on a new project in uncharted territories with gusto, your goal being gathering preliminary data that would aid generation of a hypothesis. You get data, analyze trends, feel excited, write it up and send it to YFJ (your favorite journal) – and the journal rejects it, saying, variously, “the scope of the study does not suit this journal”, “the data presented are too preliminary”, or the devastating “the research contains no novel finding”.

On another side, you want to work on a problem that you find sufficiently interesting, given, say, your observations in a smaller, restricted cohort. You are scouring through PubMed or Google Scholar for related, descriptive studies that define the problem beyond mere anecdotes. You find zilch, zippo.

The problem may lie in the extreme focus practised by many of the higher echelon journals of today. A recent guest commentary in Infection and Immunity puts this business nicely into perspective.

You can read it in the September Issue of Infection and Immunity. In case you don’t have access to IAI, you can perhaps read its reprint in the recent Microbe Magazine of ASM.

Would love to hear from you all.