The Peanuts character Snoopy was always trying to get his manuscripts published, and some of the funnier strips dealt with the responses he would often get from publishers who sent his rejected manuscripts back to him in the mail with short comments like ‘please do not ever contact us again’ or similar. In keeping with the theme of my post from yesterday about publishing your book, I thought I would talk about the difficulties involved in publishing scientific articles in established journals and the vagaries of the business when it comes to whose articles get accepted for publication and whose get rejected. I know quite a bit about this since each of my scientific publications during the past thirty years has been an exercise in blood, sweat and tears for me and my co-authors. In other words--not much fun for any of us. Of my publications to date where I was the first author, only ONE article was accepted for publication without major comments, criticisms, or requirements for extensive revisions—rather it received praise and a stamp of approval. My former boss told me at that time (1994) that I should take the short review I got from that journal, frame it and hang it in my office as I would never experience anything like it again. He was right, even though I absolutely did not want to believe him at the time. Since that time, the reviews of my work and the work of others I know have been interesting, to put it mildly. Sometimes I wonder if we are all on the same page, or even the same planet. Some of the reviews have been downright rude, others negative, others constructive but overly ambitious in the sense of what the peer reviewers suggest we do to make the paper better, others simply ridiculous. For example, a common suggestion when we get a cancer cell line article rejected is that we resubmit the article to the same journal after having done the same types of experiments in three or four more additional cell lines. That sounds like very little work on paper. But what it translates to is another one to two years of work for a small research group (four to five people) with perhaps one technician and one PhD student. To do this extra work would mean that the article’s publication would be delayed by at least two years because it will take at least a year to do the work and another year to perform the ‘submit to journal merry-go-round’. In the ‘Publish or perish’ arena that we live in each day as academic research scientists, this is unthinkable. So you send out the paper again to a new journal (that has a lower impact factor) and hope for the best. If this new journal rejects it, you send it out again to another journal, and so forth. Eventually it will usually get accepted somewhere but the entire process can take up to one year, because with each submission, you must wait sometimes up to two months to get a reply. It is frustrating and challenging and ultimately unfair, no matter what people say. But it is the system and at present there is a lot of groaning and moaning about how unfair it all is, but nothing has really changed as of yet.
I think that many of the peer reviewers (those scientists who agree to review your articles anonymously for a particular journal) come from big laboratories with fifteen or more people working for them—technicians, students, postdocs, etc. and they think that everyone else in the academic research world has the same size research group. How wrong they are. My own little research group a few years back had exactly four women in it—me, a PhD student, a Master’s student, and a technician. We worked hard, efficiently, and enthusiastically and managed to publish about four articles in good research journals in the space of the six years we were privileged to work together. Much has changed since that time in terms of getting new funding and finding new students. It’s not easy and it never will be—that is simply the name of the academic game. You either like it or you don’t. But either way, it is a struggle to survive. The more publications you have, the more funding you are likely to generate for yourself and your workplace, which in turn allows you to get more students because students are human too—they want to work for a well-funded research group that guarantees them enough money to do their experiments and to attend a few international conferences where they can present their work and network with others doing the same kind of work. It’s a formula and you get into the groove and just go with it. But sometimes things happen to push you off the path. One of those things is getting an article refused for publication many times (where you ultimately have to throw in the towel and admit defeat), another is losing the funding you once had, another is hearing from your superior that you are good but not good enough because you are not generating a lot of funding for your workplace. Because you are only as good as your last paper and your last grant—and if you don’t accept these facts you can just find another job. Academic research scientists are now expected to be money generators---in the form of grants, patents, companies on the side, research groups with many students, many networks and numerous collaborators (other academic groups as well as collaborations in industry). Those who manage all of this are the elite scientists, and they are rewarded well—their names precede them. There is nothing wrong with this except when it leads to a system that destroys the small research groups, and in my view this is the current situation in academic science, at least in the realm of cancer research.
Peer review of scientific articles is a mixed bag. It is supposed to function fairly and objectively, but it doesn’t anymore as far as many scientists are concerned. It is supposed to be an anonymous, objective, constructive review of your work since you as the author do not know who the reviewers are, but it often ends up as anything but that. And even though your paper can now be anonymized for peer reviewers as well, they may still figure out who the authors are from the article’s content. If those authors are their competitors, they can slow them down by rejecting the paper outright or by suggesting all sorts of new experiments that they know will take the authors a year or more to complete, thus delaying their progress. And so it goes. The science journal The Scientist published an interesting article recently on peer review entitled ‘I Hate Your Paper’ (http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/8/1/36/1/) that discusses the current problems with peer review and some possible solutions for how to fix them. Personally, I don’t think that the system will change too much because it is not really clear at this point what type of system will work better. But at the very least, it might be nice to get reviews back that were actually constructive, well-reasoned, and helpful and which took into account the size of the research group before rejecting the article outright for not having used enough cell lines and before suggesting additional work that will simply frustrate the submitting research group who know they will never meet the requirements. You may argue that rejection is good since it keeps the numbers of manuscripts being published down, but this is not always the case. Take a good look around as a research scientist and you will find many articles that used the same number of cell lines as perhaps you did in your experiments (similar research areas), but for some reason those papers were accepted while yours was not. Could there be cronyism involved—did the first or last author know the editor of such and such a journal and did that help them? Perhaps. But in any case, it is difficult to prove this and most scientists have enough to do without worrying about whether this is the case. You just take your Reject and resubmit reply and you do resubmit—but to another journal.
