scientific publishing | ConservationBytes.com

When to appeal a rejection

26 08 2017

Beg A modified excerpt from my upcoming book for you to contemplate after your next rejection letter.

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This is a delicate subject that requires some reflection. Early in my career, I believed the appeal process to be a waste of time. Having made one or two of them to no avail, and then having been on the receiving end of many appeals as a journal editor myself, I thought that it would be a rare occasion indeed when an appeal actually led to a reversal of the final decision.

It turns out that I was very wrong, but not in terms of simple functional probability that you might be thinking. Ironically, the harder it is to get a paper published in a journal, the higher the likelihood that an appeal following rejection will lead to a favourable outcome for the submitting authors. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: appeal, citations, editing, manuscript, peer review, publishing, rejection, review, scientific publishing, scientific writing
Categories : conservation, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing, writing tips

Attention Ecologists: Journal Ranking Survey

16 09 2014

In the interest of providing greater transparency when ranking the ‘quality’ of scientific journals, we are interested in collecting ecologists’ views on the relative impact of different ecology, conservation and multidisciplinary journals. If you’re a publishing ecologist, we want your personal opinion on a journal’s relative rank from this sample of 25 peer-reviewed journals. Please do not consult Impact Factors or other journal rankings to decide – just go with your ‘gut’ feeling.

We chose a sample of 25 authoritative journals in the field (listed below alphabetically). Use the drop-down menus to select a categorical rank. Make sure you’ve allocated categories 1 through to 4 at least once in the sample of 25. Category 5 (‘Other’) is optional.

The survey should take you only a few minutes to complete. Thanks for your time!

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Tags: ecology, journals, publishing, science, scientific publishing, survey
Categories : scientific publishing

Be a good reviewer, but be a better editor

6 06 2014

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve been at this for a while, or maybe it’s a real trend. Regardless, many of my colleagues and I are now of the opinion that the quality of editing in scientific journals is on the downhill slide.

Yes – we (scientists) all complain about negative decisions from journals to which we’ve submitted our work. Being rejected is part of the process. Aiming high is necessary for academic success, but when a negative decision is made on the basis of (often one) appalling review, it’s a little harder to swallow.

I suppose I can accept the inevitability of declining review quality for the simple reason that there are now SO MANY papers to review that finding willing volunteers is difficult. This means that there will always be people who only glance cursorily at the paper, miss the detail and recommend rejection based on their own misunderstanding or bias. It’s far easier to skim a paper and try to find a reason to reject than actually putting in the time to appraise the work critically and fairly.

This means that the traditional model of basing the decision to accept or reject a manuscript on only two reviews is fraught because the probability of receiving poor reviews is rising. For example, a certain undisclosed journal of unquestionably high quality for which I edit does not accept anything less than six recommendations for reviewers per manuscript, and none that I’m aware of is accepted or rejected based on only two reviews. But I think this is the exception rather than the rule – there are simply too many journals now of low to medium quality to be able to get that many reviewers to agree to review.

I won’t spend too much time trying to encourage you to do the best job you can when reviewing – that should go without saying. Remember what goes around comes around. If you are a shit reviewer, you will receive shit reviews. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: publishing, science, scientific publishing, scientific writing, writing
Categories : research, science, scientific publishing, scientific writing

Early to press is best for success

19 09 2013

This paper is bound to piss off a few people. So be it. This is what we found, regardless of what you want to believe.

Led by the extremely prolific Bill Laurance, we have just published a paper (online early) that looks at the correlates of publication success for biologists.

I have to preface the main message with a little philosophical discussion of that loaded word – ‘success’. What do we mean by scientific ‘success’? There are several bucket loads of studies that have attempted to get at this question, and several more that have lamented the current system that emphasises publication, publication, publication. Some have even argued that the obsession of ever-more-frequent publication has harmed scientific advancement because of our preoccupation with superficial metrics at the expense of in-depth scientific enquiry.

Well, one can argue these points of view, and empirically support the position that publication frequency is a poor metric. I tend to agree. At the same time, I am not aware of a single scientist known for her or his important scientific contributions that doesn’t have a prolific publication output. No, publishing shitloads of papers won’t win you the Nobel Prize, but if you don’t publish, you won’t win either.

So, publication frequency is certainly correlated with success, even if it’s not the perfect indicator. But my post today isn’t really about that issue. If you accept that writing papers is part of a scientist’s job, then read on. If you don’t, well …

So today I report the result of our study published online in BioScience, Predicting publication success for biologists. We asked the question: what makes someone publish more than someone else? Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Doctor of Philosophy, early-career researcher, English language, gender, misogyny, PhD, publishing, research, scientific publishing, success
Categories : conservation, research, science, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing

ISI 2009 Impact Factors now out

18 06 2010

Last year I reported the 2008 ISI Impact Factors for some prominent conservation journals and a few other journals occasionally publishing conservation-related material. ISI just released the 2009 Impact Factors, so I’ll do the same again this year, and add some general ecology journals as well. For all you Australians, I also recently reported the ERA Journal Rankings.

So here are the 2009 Impact Factors for the journals listed on this site’s Journals page and their 2008 values for comparison: Read the rest of this entry »