Every now and then I get asked to a lab or seminar to give a talk about what I do as an editor at Nature, apart from lie on my back being fed grapes by flying babies.
Quick! Feed him another one before he falls asleep!
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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What I Think About When I Think About Manuscripts
- Date:
- Tuesday, 05 May 2009 - 12:15 UTC
I see before me a wall of faces, agog and
droolingamazed to discover that Nature editors arealmostreally human. People ask me lots of questions. In fact, they ask me a lot of the same questions, mostly about peer review, and I tell them how many manuscripts I get to see in a year (around 700) and how many of these I can afford to accept (35-40). I talk somewhat of what happens between submission and acceptance or rejection, as if Nature were some kind of linear process, like making sausages.
What I don’t think I’ve ever discussed, or thought about much in any kind of deliberate way, are the thoughts that go through my mind when I look at a manuscript and decide on its fate. Actually, I have thought about it, a little, sufficiently for me to discuss it as part of a seminar course I gave at UCLA in 1996, but that was many years ago and a long way from here. I’ve passed a lot of paperwork since then.
In this post I shall try to be as honest as possible about what I think about when I think about manuscripts (acknowledging that to be objective will be impossible).
The first thing to say is I don’t actually enjoy reading manuscripts very much. Not particularly. I’d rather be walking on the beach or hiking off into a daydream in which those cherubs weirdly mutate into something like this:
Go on, tell me again the one about the release of calcium from intracellular storesNo, that’s not quite right. I do enjoy reading manuscripts, sometimes, very much. But I have to read a lot of them in a short time – I rarely have the luxury of being able to savour each well-turned phrase before it’s time for a decision to be made and I have to get on to the next manuscript.
In addition, manuscripts might be more enjoyable if they weren’t, so often, borderline unintelligible – in sum, they take a great deal of effort to understand, and it is a fact not universally acknowledged that Nature editors are mere mortals like the rest of us. It’s not so much that manuscripts have errors of spelling or grammar or are badly written, because (in the main) they don’t, and aren’t – it’s much more than that. It’s as if the authors expect readers, (and this reader in particular), to be as fully conversant with the terms, usages, protocols, excitement and importance of their work as they are themselves.
Pressure of time only compounds the lack of intelligibility – to me, lack of transparency only gets in the way of doing my job effectively. Such pressures detract from the pure serene that one might otherwise gain from reading, say, an acronym-clogged, jargon-infested billet-doux about the doubly negative interaction of one set of abbreviations with another set of abbreviations, the positively-double-positively-negative consequences being, in addition, determined, activated, repressed, enhanced or abrogated (at this stage it’s hard to tell) by another, quite different set of abbreviations.
It’s a matter of perspective.
This is a point worth dwelling on, because within its grimy folds rest many misunderstandings between
farmers and cowmenauthors and editors. Let’s imagine a case history.You are, most likely, a postdoc, trying frantically to rack up as many publications as you can before your time is up. Your field is specialized (aren’t they all?) but you think your work might have some more general applicability (that dread phrase ‘therapeutic implications’, always a downer to the jaded editorial eye). Nonetheless, you are proud that there seems to be a corner of knowledge that you have made your own. For the past three or four years you’ve lived and breathed this work. You’ve been in the lab more hours than actually exist. You see gels and apparatus and Eppendorf tubes in your dreams, and when awake, as patterns in clouds or the shapes of puddles on the sidewalk. This corner of knowledge is tiny – but to you, it is the whole world. Everything in your life is now defined by it. And that’s how you write your manuscript, your baby, sending it off all alone into a cruel world, with nothing more than a bunch of grapes to maintain its modesty. After many travails and adventures it runs into …
and promptly wets itself.
I understand this kind of proprietorial attachment perfectly well. I understand that people can get almost messianically excited by … I don’t know, synapses, or the Golgi Complex. For I, too, was once a researcher and can still get turned on by some of the things that made science fun, all those years ago. For example, when I see something like this
or this
my mind sees this
and quite possibly this
So I know what it feels like. Although I have discovered new kinds of intellectual stimulation since joining Nature (Hox genes, evo-devo, the Neutral Theory of Biodiversity, high-temperature superconductors, feathered dinosaurs, stem-tetrapods, all kinds of weird fossil hominids, extrasolar planets and other cool stuff), most of the papers I see – and judge – have only a remote connection with the things that used to float my boat.
Now, you might think this a grievous admission for a Nature editor whose gaze can reputedly pierce fire, cloud, earth and … flesh.
Appealing, is he? He doesn’t look very appealing from up here.It’s one reason why my fellow editors are very reluctant to
cavortparade in the public gaze the precise subjects in which they are trained, because if they did, they’d get irate letters from rejected authors complaining that the person who rejected their manuscript was not competent to have done so.My response to any such complainant (I have never received such a complaint, personally, as far as I can recall) would be that manuscripts that require such specialist knowledge that they can only be handled by a specialist editor should be sent to a specialist journal, and not to Nature. Therefore, for my part, I am happy to exhibit the extent of my own ignorance given the task I am set, to emphasize that even though it’s Nature, a high-profile journal of record read by
Professor Trellis of North Walesseveral millions, people really shouldn’t have to work as hard as that.So, here it is.
My Qualifications
- B.Sc., Class I, Zoology and Genetics, University of Leeds, 1984.
- Ph.D. Zoology, University of Cambridge, 1991, thesis entitled Bovidae from the Pleistocene of Britain
- One (1) published paper on my Ph.D. subject.
- Several books on subjects quite different from my Ph.D. and in which one could argue I wasn’t an expert.
- A review of a Motorhead concert in Cantab.
My Responsibilities
- Handling manuscripts in palaeontology, comparative biology, systematic zoology and botany, evolutionary developmental biology, biomechanics, archaeology. I also get to read, comment on and handle papers on genomics, some aspects of molecular biology and development that have evolutionary angles, all other parts of organismal biology including theoretical, experimental and evolutionary ecology.
Thousands of manuscripts have come under the pitiless gaze of the Gee over the years – not one of which has been in the speciality in which I am trained. Now, the question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
I would (naturally) say that a little perspective is a good thing. After a while, one doesn’t really need to know the fine details of a manuscript to have some sense that it is likely to make it into Nature or not. In most cases, it’s easy to judge whether a manuscript represents an incremental advance or a fundamental finding, irrespective of its subject matter. In fact, too much knowledge can be a hindrance. When I receive manuscripts in topics dear to my heart, I worry that I might be sending manuscripts out to review that I find exciting, even though, were one to sit back and take a breath, the advance is, when it comes down to it, incremental. That’s why we editors tend to circulate draft decisions and opinions among our colleagues – to get the perspective of people who know less of the details than we do, and so have more of an appreciation of the whole picture.
Researchers with any sense, or who wish to get on in life, will read around the subject. They’ll scan the literature in fields apart from the one they need to master for the purposes of work. It’s worth noting that in any interview for a position at Nature, candidates are likely to be asked to talk about things they’ve read recently outside their field – and that this is the question that generally causes otherwise faultless candidates to stumble. One might argue that Nature and journals like it are there to serve that need. That’s why we have features and articles explaining scientific papers to non-specialists, and why we ask authors of research papers to be more accessible than they otherwise might be. I still remember getting a call from a palaeontologist to say how much he’d enjoyed reading a review article in that week’s issue about protein folding. He felt he’d learned something.
What makes this job worthwhile is reading a manuscript which you just know will change things. Such elicit JFK moments – you remember where you were when you read the manuscript. These manuscripts are extremely rare. I guess that sensation has happened only five or six times in my >21 years at Nature. It’s probably no surprise to learn that these manuscripts generally concern palaeontology.
However, there have been one or two, handled by my colleagues and outside my field, that have seized my imagination. One of these was this paper, an account of a computer model of the Drosophila segment polarity module, a paper which catalyzed a whole book. What really gets me going is when the authors share with me, the reader, something of the journey that led to the results, rather than just the results themselves. What made that paper exciting was the researchers’ account of the repeated failure of their model to mimic reality, and how they applied the lessons learned at each stage to reap eventual success. This is not an argument for negative results, but for a way of writing that engages the reader.
Perhaps what I am getting at is that scientific papers tend to be static. The best literature – of any kind – has a beginning, a middle and an end, in which the protagonists undertake some kind of journey, whether geographical or spiritual, and are changed by their experiences. In scientific papers, the results often give us no clue to the back story – the reason why the researchers were studying this system or that, and the tale of chances and mistakes and serendipity that led them to that point. The only readable parts tend to be the introduction, in which literature is summarized (a classic case of telling but not showing) and the discussion (in which the new result is integrated into what is already known).
When I sit down to read a manuscript, the question in my head – what I think about, when I think about manuscripts – is how the sheaf of paper in my hands, or the dots on my screen, will change the way I see the world, in some fundamental way. So much the better if I can see how the world was changed for the researchers in the course of making their own discoveries.
Last updated: Tuesday, 05 May 2009 - 12:15 UTC
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Comments
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Fantastic post, Henry.
(Nothing sensible to say, not now I’m not doing research, anyway, but thought you deserved a comment or six.).
Thank you, Richard. It also took several days to write. It’s very hard getting a mass of inchoate thoughts and feelings into words.
Great post! I’m all for watching sausages and journals being made (but not laws – some things are too disgusting).
I have taken notes. It seems that my paper on fossilised cherub sausages might have a chance of acceptance.
The 5% acceptance rate is about the same as the number of students in a given group who get an A+ on an assignment. I don’t curve grades deliberately, and still find that there is usually a small number, around that percentage, that is just far above the rest. And not even the same students on every assignment. I was marking several assignments from the same group of students earlier this year, and there was nobody who consistently did that well, but in every pile of assignments there were one or two real gems.
The thing is, even without knowing which student would do well that time around, and without knowing if there would be one or two or zero perfect grades, I could spot them immediately once I started reading. The difference between a B+ and an A- takes a while to figure out, but when a student excels, and is in that top 5%, you don’t realize that at the very last moment when you’re adding up all the points – you know while you’re reading.
So the question is: do you spot the ones that get accepted right away? Or is the quality (and writing style) of all first drafts so close together that you really have to struggle to find out whether it has potential or not?
Thanks for that, Eva. I think it’s easy to spot the papers that you know should be in Nature (and those that you know definitely shouldn’t) but that’s always subject to referee approval, but what lies between is a vast middle ground, and that’s what we find ourselves spending most of our time reading and thinking about.
Writing as someone who was recently in the quantitative research game (and is now faced with a somewhat different approach to scholarship) I’m curious how often fads filter into the acceptance process. Looking back, do editors see papers that, in hindsight, weren’t really up to snuff but in the heat of the moment were considered an exciting breakthrough? What are the modern examples of aether or phlogiston?
I had a good chuckle reading this, since I have much the same to say about all the proposals I get to read as an NSF Program Officer. I also truly enjoy a well-written proposal, and not simply another dry piece of matzo.
Now, would fossilized cherub sausages be coprolites, or ichnofossils? Hmm…
Ah, Henry, your post brought back a lot of memories.
When I was an editor, I often got (strangely, only from authors I’d rejected) the email equivalent of under-the-breath-muttering about how our editorial team weren’t top scientists in the field so how dare we think we had the knowledge to pass judgment. But it was precisely because the journal was of ‘broad interest’ across biology that made it so glaringly obvious to, say, a signal transductionalist, that this treatise on the minutiae of a particular cell type under specific conditions was not going to interest the majority of our readership. Some authors seem to lack the ability to see their work from the outside perspective.
“What are the modern examples of aether or phlogiston?”
High-throughput screening. When it was new, you could just publish “WE DID A SCREEN!!” but now you can’t publish that anywhere unless you actually verified your hits.
Hollow laugh. Where have you been, dear? Not just verify your hits any more, but follow up on one especially juicy one and present seven figures of biological data showing its mechanism of action. My boss likes to say that nowadays, “we did a screen” is just the first line in the Materials and Methods.
Um. Now where was I with my screen, again?
Eva… that’s the way it should be! What is the point of doing a screen unless you a) validate your hits and b) use it to actually decipher something new about the biology of the system being studied? Speaking from experience, validation is the hard part.
Not unlike the rush to do “microarray” studies when they first became widely available. No doubt NG sequencing papers will go the same way.
Oh… and the most interesting ;)
Very interesting post Henry, by the way. Thanks for the insight.
what I’m thinking, when I think about manuscripts – is how the sheaf of paper in my hands, or the dots on my screen, will change the way I see the world, in some fundamental way.
Just as well I never even dreamed about sending a manuscript your way, Henry… but I am
deludedconvinced I contributed fundamentally to my tiny little specialized area while I was at it.Man, that B&W photo of Henry and a glass bottle makes him look like such a
nice chappystreet gangsta. But then of course, there’s the remix version:-@ EMJ: I’m curious how often fads filter into the acceptance process. Looking back, do editors see papers that, in hindsight, weren’t really up to snuff but in the heat of the moment were considered an exciting breakthrough? What are the modern examples of aether or phlogiston?
A very good question. Yes, I’m sure there have been papers like that. When ancient DNA was all new and shiny, we published a couple of papers whose conclusions have since come in for a lot of stick: papers which probably wouldn’t have passed muster these days because the field has evolved, and protocols are a lot tighter than they were.
On the whole, though, I think the ‘faddiness’ is more apparent than real. Yes, I’ve heard the usual quips from scientists who feel that their field is terminally unsexy (usually a mistaken impression anyway) of the sort that if only they included ‘HIV’ or ‘High-termperature superconductor’ or whatever in the title, then the paper would go out to review. However, it’s part of our job to be alive to the latest trends, and as every one knows, these rise and fall like fashionable hemlines.
@ Paul: welcome to this thread. While I was writing the post I did think of NSF panels and the like. Is it true that proposals are called ‘jackets’, as depicted in Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy? I do hope so. Nature has its own jargon for manuscripts. ‘Pinks’ are brand-new manuscripts, ‘Yellows’ are mss on which decisions are about to be made, and ‘Greens’ are accepted mss. The jargon comes from the colour of the cover sheet at each stage. We used to refer Research Articles (as opposed to Letters to Nature’) as ’ST’s – this stands for ‘Small Type’ because in years gone by they were printed in smaller fonts than other categories of manuscript.
Oh, and by the way, ichnofossils. Technically, I believe that coprolites are a class of ichnofossil, but I’m happy to be corrected. I always thought the Coprolites were members of an Ethiopian monastic order whose heyday was long before the Council of Nicaea.
@ Jenny: Some authors seem to lack the ability to see their work from the outside perspective. I think most authors are like that – even those who are old hands, with many, many Nature papers on their CVs. But it’s part of my job (or so I believe) to represent the interests of the reader. Of course, readers, referees and authors are not mutually exclusive groups.
@ Darren: you’re welcome.
@ Steffi: in that case, you have an appropriate sense of perspective. I do get quite a lot of papers which are perfectly respectable but which quite clearly belong in a specialist journal – along with most of the other papers published by the authors concerned. I have the sense that some people try it on – hoping that, maybe, we’ll blink and by some quirk of fate we’ll send the paper to review, this time. This strategy is almost cost-free for the authors, who know that a rejection-without-review from Nature will arrive pretty quickly, within a couple of days of submission, after which they’ll send the ms elsewhere.
@ Graham: is that your hand holding the bottle or are you just pleased to see me?
Your field is specialized (aren’t they all?) but you think your work might have some more general applicability (that dread phrase ‘therapeutic implications’, always a downer to the jaded editorial eye)
Sometimes the hardworking postdoc or grad student is
forcedencouraged to write the manuscript for and submit it to a glamour journal such as Nature, very much against her better judgment. The hapless postdoc or student then feels as if she is being set up for heartwrenching ego-crushing failure, and develops and impending sense of DOOM whilst waiting for the inevitable rejection notice. I’ll stick to the specialist journals, thanks.I’ve always been amused by the co-publication phenomenon in glamour journals, for similar or identical results from different labs. One of my publications from postdoctoral years falls squarely into this weird category. My PhD mentor describes the phenomenon thus: “By remarkable coincidence, these papers on Growth Factor X appeared in the same issue of Cool ….”
Sometimes the hardworking postdoc or grad student is forced encouraged to write the manuscript for and submit it to a glamour journal such as Nature, very much against her better judgment
And then there are those of us who get told by the boss to give up and submit to a “lower impact” journal after 2 rounds of review, performing extra experiments etc. with a glamour journal. Come to think of it, by the time we’d finished everything the referees asked for, most of the original data had been consigned to supplementary data!
@ Kristi, the co-publication issue always gets a laugh out of me. I find it can be quite enlightening to follow the trail of submission dates in the various publications, an interesting pattern often emerges. OK, maybe I’ve been living in Nth America too long and I’m starting to take on the love of a good conspiracy theory ;)
Great stuff Henry, particularly the point about having some perspective, though I’m sure you can appreciate that a certain obsessiveness about the minutiae is sometimes necessary for scientific success, even it if does blind you to the world around you.
And I can relate to the desire to have the narrative that precedes the ‘great discovery’ but inclusion of this is surely precluded by the severe word limits. The ‘Making the Paper’ feature is sometimes a nice way to redress this.
It was like reading a version of Myth Busters. Great post.
Rumor among postdocs has it that if you look at a Nature editor right into their eyes you turn into a salt statue.
Great post.
Fantastic post. I agree that often, talking to scientists about the minitiae of their field, while fascinating, can be a bit painful if you haven’t read as extensively as they have. Most people are cognizant that it’s not possible to keep up with multiple fields of expertise, though I have met a few that do maintain some unreasonable expectations (don’t we all?)
In my daily job, I cover everything from stem cell research (adult and embryonic), “basic techniques” like ELISAs and flow cytometry, and often have to bring my own lab experience and research in on questions where no one else at my job has any knowledge on it.
What this means is that in any given hour, I may have switched from talking to someone about how to quantitate the levels of a cytokine in a patient’s serum, to why someone’s human induced pluripotent stem cells aren’t expressing Oct 3/4, to the factors that affect the ability of an established hybridoma cell line to produce a particular antibody, to how to enumerate neural stem cells from the mouse subventricular zone of the brain.
What I’ve learned along the way, while getting excited talking to others about their life’s work, is that you have to ask the right questions. Ask more questions than you talk, and you will learn something. People love to teach others about what they do, if you just ask.
Of course, I’m sure that advice doesn’t work well for an editor, but it sure does for anyone who need to cover more science than they can possibly absorb themselves.
@ Kristi: I’ve always been amused by the co-publication phenomenon in glamour journals, for similar or identical results from different labs.
The near-simultaneous discoveries of similar things is too common to be a coincidence. It happens, I guess, because scientists are at the same time highly competitive and strongly connected, and even people in rival labs send reagents to one another (something which, incidentally, is a condition of acceptance of any paper in Nature).
@ Darren: And then there are those of us who get told by the boss to give up and submit to a “lower impact” journal after 2 rounds of review, performing extra experiments etc. with a glamour journal.
Your boss has good instincts. After a couple of rounds of review it’s usually clear that we’ve entered the Desperate Valley of Diminishing Returns. We don’t have any hard and fast rules on this, but in general we discourage multiple rounds of review. At some point it’s clear that a manuscript has had its chance; the referees get bored, the authors get frustrated, and at that point it’s usually better all round if the author ends the agony and simply publishes the paper elsewhere. After an author sent his manuscript (which I was handling) a first-birthday card, I got the message that you just can’t carry a torch for a manuscript indefinitely.
@ Stephen: And I can relate to the desire to have the narrative that precedes the ‘great discovery’ but inclusion of this is surely precluded by the severe word limits. The ‘Making the Paper’ feature is sometimes a nice way to redress this.
Whenever I see the word ‘surely’ I suspect that special pleading will follow …. I am always suspicious of the this-space-is-too-small-to-contain-my-marvelous-discovery arguments; appeals that say ‘we did all the things the referees wanted, but Nature format precludes including them’, as if it’s our fault their paper didn’t meet the referees’ approval. There is always space to include things that are necessary, and I’d say that context is one of them – it can be done in a couple of sentences. When people ask me about lengths of manuscript prior to submission, I always say that they shouldn’t get too hung up about the precise details of format – these can be sorted out later. The content is the important thing, and it’s best for referees to see as much as possible.
@ Craig: It was like reading a version of Myth Busters. Great post.
Thank you. That’s very much what it’s like. It’s great to have some kind of mystique, but the reputation Nature has as a kind of black box does mystify and terrify people, which can be counterrpoductive, I feel.
@ Roberto: Rumor among postdocs has it that if you look at a Nature editor right into their eyes you turn into a salt statue.
… on the other hand, anyone who said that being a Nature editor isn’t a power trip would be a liar. I do have a phrase, though, about presubmission enquiries. In general, I say to authors that I can’t judge a worth of a manuscript untuil it’s so close that I can see the whites of its eyes.
@ Kyrsten: all advice gratefully received, I assure you. I once asked a very senior scientist who seemd to have a deep knowledge of absolutely everything how he managed to be so knowledgeable. ‘I don’t watch the television’ was his instant answer.
I once asked a very senior scientist who seemd to have a deep knowledge of absolutely everything how he managed to be so knowledgeable. ‘I don’t watch the television’ was his instant answer.
Heh. A colleague in editorial just asked how she was supposed to tell which of the three pictures an author had sent were figures one, two or three, seeing as they were unlabelled and she only had unmatched captions to work with. I said ’let’s have a look’, even though I know, allegedly, nothing about cardiac surgery.
Turned out to be dead easy. After all, these people are only medics, and I’ve seen what med students are like at college.
My colleague was dead impressed, but what she doesn’t realize is that it really doesn’t take much to give the impression of vast knowledge. You only have to be able to know a little bit more than those around you, and know where to look; and be good at bull-shitting.
it really doesn’t take much to give the impression of vast knowledge. You only have to be able to know a little bit more than those around you, and know where to look; and be good at bull-shitting.
In my brief stints as schoolteacher and, later, supervisor of undergraduates, I found that all I needed to do was to be one step ahead of my charges to give the impresion of boundless knowledge. It’s a high-risk strategy, I admit.
HG. Well, great post, loved it! I almost fainted when I scrolled down to see what I thought was Ms B. Page tenderly slurping a slushy, but your choice in Rubenesque brunette’s ain’t so bad.
Ahem {mops brow}, back to the post. It adds much needed clarity to the editorial process. I wonder if you could comment more about how much an editor can actively contribute to disagreement between reviewers and authors? Especially if conflicting reports are received from different reviewers?
I’ve experienced the whole gamut from abject editorial silence to highly constructive guidance. And this does not necessarily correlate with the ‘speciality’ of the journal that handles the MS. But the more guidance from an Ed., the better I feel!
Hi Mike: the Rubenesque Brunette is the Divine Nigella,
voluptuous sexpotcelebrity chef.Editors can certainly contribute actively to disagreement between referees and authors. For example, were I to say to an author that the referee says she’s a fat cow and her paper’s a disgrace, then much disagreement would ensue as surely as a coughing pig would be ejected from the Houses of Parliament.
However, I don’t think that’s what you mean.
When a paper goes out to review the editor plays the role of a ringmaster, or chairman of a debate. When we receive all the reports in on a manuscript, we judge the outcome on the totality of the reports. We can overrule both positive and negative reports if we think we can justify such actions, based on the relevance of the referees’ expertise to the particular points at issue and how serious these issues are; but also with a good measure of common sense and, I have to say, gut instinct. After a while you get to know your referees, and can read between the lines. However, if we get conflicting reports that we cannot finesse any other way, we call in arbitrating referees.
One very useful thing we do is send revisions to the original panel of referees alongside reports from all the referees on the previous version. That gives the referees a chance to calibrate their own views against those of their peers – and it also hel[ps weed out referees whose comments are, in fact, unreasonable.
Does that help?
They weren’t monastic: they were the ones who weren’t prepared to take all the vows.
I feel I should make some serious comment, but other than “great post”, there’s not much more I can think of. Except that it’s sometimes difficult to get a feel for Nature considers of general interest. More details on request, but I don’t want to sound like I’m whinging.
Cheers, Henry. Actually, the idea that a general journal shouldn’t have a specialist editor does make sense. Not only should the reviewers be able to understand what an author is promoting, but (perhaps more importantly) non-specialists should be able to see through the mists of jargon. A non-specialist Ed. is in a decent position to sense this.
So, to echo Bob’s sentiments1, seriously, what the hell is a non-specialist supposed to take from this article
The ITQ-37 mesoporous chiral zeolite?
Even the title gives me chirals in the mesopores.
1 entiments, ntiments, iments
(From waaaay up in the comments)
“Eva… that’s the way it should be! What is the point of doing a screen unless you a) validate your hits and b) use it to actually decipher something new about the biology of the system being studied? Speaking from experience, validation is the hard part.”
Yeees… That’s why you can no longer just publish a screen as is. That’s what the example was – a thing that used to be publishable but isn’t anymore.
I’m confused about the responses to my comment way up, both Jenny’s and Darren’s, because I feel it somehow makes me look like I don’t know about screening. I actually worked on it for YEARS – only not very successfully. I tried to set up a high content RNAi screen from scratch, but the only thing I learned was that it would never work in our system/institute/machine and I couldn’t publish anything, and then I realized that TONS of people are in that situation, and unable to publish the stuff that didn’t work, but because everyone only reads the published (working!) stuff, it seems way simpler than it is. And that whole episode ignited my enthusiasm for things like Nature Precedings, where people can publish things. (Working on a submission, but is way at the bottom of my to do list)
Out of pity for my years of screen-FAIL, I got to help another grad student analyse the results of his screen as a side project, so my name is at least going to be on a screen paper, but as 2nd author – not 1st. It’s only just been submitted, and we got new data just after it, so it’s going to be in a lot of back-and-forthing before it ever comes out. Anyway, when it does, you’ll see that I’m very much aware of how much validation and follow-up is necessary. But that doesn’t take away the fact that a few years ago screens were just published as is, without much interpretation.
Just for the record, so there is no unfinished trail of me looking stupid on the internet.
Thanks, G. Very well written and illuminating. You know what would be awesome? If this “what I’m thinking when I think about” thing turned into a meme among blogging editors and they all wrote something similar.
(…) “A review of a Motorhead concert in Cantab.”
Fantastic! A blog post born to raise hell.
@ Henry: just for the record, it wasn’t Nature. But I do take your point, the whole thing got totally bogged down. Probably the most frustrating part was one referee’s insistence on trying to force the manuscript into an area we were never trying to address in the first place, I suspect to fit into their field of specialty. Anyway, we still go it published (as 2 papers actually) in good journals, so the boss was probably right. It was an interesting ride nonetheless.
@ Eva: Sorry, the exclamation marks were merely there to strengthen my hearty agreement with your statement. I was just adding my 2 cents worth
“After an author sent his manuscript (which I was handling) a first-birthday card, I got the message that you just can’t carry a torch for a manuscript indefinitely.”
Really?! LMAO!
Thanks, Dr. Ghee. Very well written and illuminating. You know what would be awesome? If this “what I’m thinking when I think about” thing turned into a meme among blogging editors and they all wrote something similar.
That notion is but soooo top drawer William, “even my Tallboy wen’t arse over backwards”. (And you can quote me on that, out of context, but of course – missus).
A Tallboy, falling over tonight.
Dr. Ghee
Do many submitting authors try to butter you up?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Only the
lonelyGarlic Nan’s…A rather tasty Garic Nan, eaten last week.
Can ya smell it ??
Does this taxi go to the curry shop ????
@ Bob: They weren’t monastic: they were the ones who weren’t prepared to take all the vows
Which vows didn’t they take?
_ … it’s sometimes difficult to get a feel for Nature considers of general interest._
The phrase ‘general interest’ in our reject letters is probably the single biggest cause of appeals on rejections. For my part – and I can really only speak for myself – I interpret ‘general interest’ as meaning that a manuscript will demonstrate some fundamental, conceptual novelty that is capable of generalization beyond the system in which it is described. Here is a rough breakdown of the kinds of manuscripts I get that are likely to be rejected without review. I emphasize that such manuscripts are, overwhelmingly, perfectly respectable, and will find a home in a high-impact specialty journal:
It’s hard to give a positive list – apart from saying that there’d be a germ of conceptual novelty – partly because the feeling that a paper is ‘right’ for Nature is, for me, governed in part by instinct. As Eva said above for A-grade papers, you immediately just know.
@ Mike: yes, a mesoporous chiral zeolite is a zeolite (mineral with holes in) which has … er … medium-sized holes, and a handedness to its structure. The relevance of this paper is in its application to industrial catalytic processes, which is pretty clear from the abstract. But yes, I take your point, our wish for accessibility is too often honoured in the breach. A few weeks ago I got scolded by theEditor for having the word ‘Ornithischian’ in a title.
@ Eva: Yeees… That’s why you can no longer just publish a screen as is. That’s what the example was – a thing that used to be publishable but isn’t anymore.
Quite. We often have discussions about how high we should raise the bar. Genomics is a case in point. The first few genomes were technological landmarks more than anything else, but the ante has to be upped with each submission, as sequencing becomes easier and cheaper. Now that the tree of life is fairly peppered with genomes, I am increasingly drawn into discussions about whether we should consider this genome or that based on the contribution it might make to our understanding of evolution.
@ Cath: Yes, really.
@ Graham – that’s horrible. How many people had eaten that nan before you did?
people in rival labs send reagents to one another (something which, incidentally, is a condition of acceptance of any paper in Nature)
You know, of course, all the ways in which this fails utterly to have any impact on the actual sharing of anything: oops, we sent the wrong plasmid (five times); sorry, we lost your email (seventeen times); and so on. And on.
Not that it’s not a lovely bit of window dressing, but without some kind of follow-up it smacks of a zero-cost way to make a journal look good — the scientific equivalent of greenwashing.
I’m still waiting for one of the many journals which have this kind of “you must share” statement to back it up; e.g, “you can cc: us on requests for reagents published in our journal, and we will
blacklistseverely chastise anyone who does not comply”.@ William: heh! You know what to do.
@ Marcos: We palaeontologists like to rock hard.
@ Bill. Oh, Bill.
Not that it’s not a lovely bit of window dressing, but without some kind of follow-up it smacks of a zero-cost way to make a journal look good — the scientific equivalent of greenwashing.
Science is based on trust, and, believe me, news of people in small communities who do ill by their neighbours gets around. And what do you think we should do. We’re not policemen. We can’t enforce anything.
I’m still waiting for one of the many journals which have this kind of “you must share” statement to back it up; e.g, “you can cc: us on requests for reagents published in our journal, and we will blacklist severely chastise anyone who does not comply”.
So we should send Da Boyz round? You volunteering? You wanna piece of me, punk?
Excellent post HG.
One Endeavours To Give Satisfaction, Sir.
Thank you Henry for this wonderful post. Required reading.
High-throughput screening. When it was new, you could just publish “WE DID A SCREEN!!” but now you can’t publish that anywhere unless you actually verified your hits.
Interestingly, the journal Blood today announced that they will start to publish just that, i.e. interesting and technically sound screening data without functional verification.
We’re not policemen. We can’t enforce anything.
Then why word things (“a condition of acceptance”) as though you can? Is it on the theory that “locks only keep honest people out”?
Science is based on trust
And here I thought it was supposed to be based on evidence. It seems to be based more and more on winks and nods.
believe me, news of people in small communities who do ill by their neighbours gets around
I honestly find it difficult to believe you, because in my 15 years (at the bottom of the food chain; which, of course, pales in comparison to your millennia on the Olympus that is Nature) I’ve never seen it happen. I’ve seen a few bad actors and I’ve heard plenty of news that has got around — and guess what? I’ve never seen it come to actual consequences. Not once.
For consequences to ensue, there must be a whistleblower: and you and I both know what happens to whistleblowers in this “small community”. I’ve read a few stories about unlucky or stupid individuals who got caught so clearly that their institutions could not whitewash it, and so went for the “look at us cleaning house” PR instead. Those stories are splashed around precisely because they’re so rare (and even in those stories the consequences for the whistleblowers are usually still catastrophic).
Bill. Nature does follow up on people who don’t share reagents, and we have resolved many such issues over the years. Occasionally, we have “named and shamed” via imposed corrections (inextricably linked to the published paper), and shall continue to do so. A quality journal like Nature is expensive to run and resource – one reason being precisely because we take these things seriously and ensure compliance with our policies.
Maxine, that’s awesome. Seriously. I realize that following up on sharing compliance is expensive and time-consuming (and potentially just bloody horrible for whoever has to get involved), and I think it’s a tremendous service to the community. I’m thrilled to find that Nature actually does it.
Don’t suppose you can point me to any such published corrections? I tried Entrez with various limits but couldn’t find any. I’d like to know more about how the process works, and I’d like to blog about it. I think this is a big deal.
@ Martin: thank you.
@ Maxine: thanks for those clarifications.
@ Bill – I think you’re being somewhat disingenous, in places. Of course science is based on evidence, but the process itself is based on trust – the community of scientists and editors operates on a do-as-you-would-be-done-by system, which is largely self-regulating, because today’s author is tomorrow’s referee, and vice-versa. Yes, we state it as a condition of acceptance that people should share materials and methods, so that people know where we stand. We simply cannot afford to ensure that every single author abides by this rule, but when we receive complaints about such violations we follow them up – by letter, phone call, and so on, until we can get some kind of resolution, knowing that provision of reagents to anyone who asks is itself a time-consuming and expensive process for authors. Having said that, we don’t blacklist authors who fail to comply. The only circumstance in which we’d blacklist anyone is a case of duplicate publication, and when that happens (very rarely) we have been known to make the affair public. We also make ourselves aware of current trends in malpractice such as plagiarism. Yes, we take these things seriously.
process itself is based on trust… largely self-regulating…
And just look how well that’s working out. (You need not look far.)
I assure you I am not being disingenuous. I do not think the honor system is working now that there’s at once so much (in aggregate) and (at the individual level) so little money at stake; and it should be replaced wherever possible with insistence on evidence.
when we receive complaints about such violations we follow them up
Like I said, I’m very pleased to find that Nature does this (and I’d like to know more).
(The
blacklistpart was an attempt at humour; I can see how it wouldn’t come across though, given the context.)It’s true that journals aren’t a police force and it is true that the system, as with any profession, operates on the basis of the people in it being honest.
That having been said, if a journal has policies, part of the point of having the policies is that the journal enforces them – which thanks to the Internet it can do, via correcting the published record more efficiently than was possible in the old days of print-only.
I’ve actually read on a few blogs the Merck/Elsevier story being extrapolated to conclude that the scientific publication system is not working, and/or that the subscription publishing model (cf author pays model) is not working. None of these general conclusions can be made from this shocking story. (I’m sure nobody in this thread is making these generalisations. But I still do get surprised occasionally, though I know I should not, that scientists, who are trained to think logically and to how apply evidence, don’t do that. I hope they are more rigorous when it comes to their own research programmes!)
Bill, old chap, you’re talking through your hat. Of course science should be based on evidence, but we’re not talking about science so much as scientists and their behaviour. Second, shit happens, but that’s not necessarily an indictment of the system. Being an editor is very much a matter of practical politics, pragmatism and compromise. Much like real life, in fact. In my experience, people who come to the editorial table full of high-minded idealism either soon change their views, or leave.
Henry, A terrific post and a fascinating thread. In all fairness to journals, I think you should refer to Nature as what it is – a magazine, not a journal. Magazines must be more selective than journals. Calling Nature a journal, you may frustrate more than help potential authors for your magazine. Instead, when you refer to Nature magazine, these same authors stay mindful that Nature’s readership is general and that’s why you, the editor, must be more selective than even editor of the best journal in any specialty research field.
Thanks so much, Henry, for identifying one of your favorite papers, the Dassow segment polarity paper. A quick scan of the abstract showed me why you found the paper so compelling, and made me eager to read the whole article. And, as a science writer who hankers to write a book myself someday, I can’t wait for my copy of Jacob’s Ladder to arrive. Meanwhile, if you ever want to tell this group something more about your journey from reading the article to writing your book, I’m sure many of us would like to read such a post.
Cheers,
Beth
Thanks, Beth. Nature is rather a strange creature, and this is a product of its history. It did indeed start very much as a magazine, but that was back in the day when the concept of a professional scientist was unknown, and there was little distinction between the ‘front half’ (the news, features, celeb gossip and entertainment fluff) and the ‘back half’ (original scientific research). Most of us who spend most of our time in the back half think of Nature as a journal, as do, I suspect, most of the scientists who submit papers, and the referees who assess them. However, the late John Maddox, former Editor of Nature, saw it very much as a news magazine similar to The Economist. So I think you can see it as one or the other, depending on which way you’re looking.
I can’t wait for my copy of Jacob’s Ladder to arrive
I hope you enjoy it!
Meanwhile, if you ever want to tell this group something more about your journey from reading the article to writing your book, I’m sure many of us would like to read such a post.
That’s a thought. I might just try that. Sufficient time has elapsed for me to piece together the narrative of that book.