The editor of most journals is the gatekeeper. Therefore, inquiry with the editor or a member of the editorial staff as to if your paper is appropriate is very important, especially when submitting to journals like Ecology, PNAS, etc. With PNAS, discussion with an academy member is probably sufficient (and largely important!). As you traverse from generalized international journals like Science and Nature to specialized journals like a specific taxon journal, or regionalized like Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science, there is a tendency for editors to increasingly treat reviewer decisions as law, and follow their recommendations closely. However, PNAS for example, will reject your paper outright if you get a single non-accept decision, so I am making a gross generalization here. This general trend causes people to have difficulty when they submit to generalized vs. specialized/regionalized journals. The writing style and content are much differently approached. In a specialized journal, you are writing for an audience that has a specific, detailed understanding of your field. For a generalized audience, you are addressing a homogenous group of readers who range from novice to expert and from poorly to extremely educated.
For a paper to get published in a very generalized journal, it is essential that the author defend to the editor that their paper will be of interest to a generalized audience. Then, the paper must be written in a manner that targets that audience. This is largely in conflict with the way we write for a specialized journal. Explaining why a paper on fungus beetle evolution is of interest to the general community may be very difficult. THus, we seen tons of specialists with specialized manuscripts unable to get in major generalized journals. However, it does happen. The clear key issue here when your paper is said not to be of generalized interest is to figure out why your paper is of generalized interest, defend it to the editor in an effective manner, and get through that hurdle. Sometimes, upon critical, objective consideration, we discover our paper is in fact NOT of generalized interest due to content, writing style, or current trends. The first step to bridging the gap between writing for specialists and writing for generalized audiences is to ensure your writing is in line with the audiences involved. This is not a simple task. I suspect the recent program at ESA (?) will address some of this? At the end of the day, done is better than perfect sometimes. PUblished in a speciality journal instead of a generalized journal is way better than aging in a drawer or computer file. Too many of us get overly-focused on where we publish rather than IF we publish. Publishing is not hard, writing in a manner that transcends our specializations to inform a general audience is very hard for people who are trained to write to their specialist peers. Perhaps having a few people who regularly publish in said generalized outlets read and comment on your paper would help you reach that goal. My dept. chair (an endowed position) a few years ago came out of Johns Hopkins and had published in the extreme generalized journals a lot. We were talking about publishing because I had a paper in peer review with one of the top tier generalized journals (not sure if I should say name or not, so left off!). However, he stopped doing it. Why? Because his discipline's journal was plenty good enough for him (as he put it). In fact, he said he published almost every paper in the same journal during the past 5-10 years (I forgot how long he had been there). His point to me was that it was more important to be published than where to be published. Clearly, getting hits in bigtime outlets is important, but it is not the end-game. I think he was partly preparing me for the likely possiblity my paper would be rejected (heck, only 10% of submissions made the peer-review stage!). It did, I got a great peer review, submitted it elsewhere and it was published, and has been cited A LOT. I guess the bottom line is that if your work is good, where it gets published is not as important as one thinks. Likewise, if your work is bad, it only matters to the journal that published it! Never be ashamed of not getting in <name top tier journal>, what is shaming, is waffling on submitting and not publishing the work you did (or not doing any work in the first place within the constraints of your conflicting responsibilities!) :) On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Edwin Cruz-Rivera < edwin.cruzriv...@uvi.edu> wrote: > Dear all, > > I apologize for the cross listing. We are trying to cover as broad a > canvas as possible: > > In the past years, journals have increased the responsibilities of > editors-in-chief to the point that they have become gatekeepers of their > publications. The bottom line is that papers get sent out to peer reviewers > only when editors say so, if they deem the article to be "of broad enough > interest" to their readers. > > > Clearly, there is a spectacular number of problems with this (though we do > not seem to talk about them). For one, systematic bias can be introduced in > a multitude of ways: what terrestrial researchers consider "hot topics" of > "general interest" may not be the same as what freshwater or marine ones > do. I keep glancing at the plant-herbivore interactions literature seeing > how marine papers often cites terrestrial works, but not the other way > around. > > > After talking to several colleagues, it seems that the trend is "I (insert > editors name) don't think this is of general interest but it is really > good, so I recommend you submit your manuscript to this journal of *also > general interest* (open access journal from our publisher that costs you > thousands of dollars to publish in)." This, frankly, seems like a dishonest > practice; if it is good enough for one general ecology journal it should be > for another. Have we exchanged fashion for quality? We want to know your > opinion. > > > We would like to compile data on the frequency of such cases. Our > hypothesis is that the definition of "general interest" or "worthy of peer > review" in ecology is completely arbitrary and we will be designing an > experiment to test this, but we would like to establish a baseline by > asking for cases in which authors have felt their papers have been rejected > out of bias rather than merit. In order to narrow the field, it will be > important to have articles that were published in journals after "broader" > journals rejected them without peer review. > > > Your responses will be kept confidential, > > > Edwin > > ================= > Dr. Edwin Cruz-Rivera > Associate Professor > Department of Biological Sciences > University of the Virgin Islands > #2 John Brewers Bay > St. Thomas 00802 > USVI > Tel: 1-340-693-1235 > Fax: 1-340-693-1385 > > "It is not the same to hear the devil as to see him coming your way" > (Puerto Rican proverb) > > > > > > -- Malcolm L. 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