Sell no manuscript before its time

This classic TV advertisement from the late 1970s features Orson Welles proclaiming that Paul Masson winery will not sell its wine until it is ready.

Unfortunately, many authors “sell” their manuscript to journals before they are ready to enter peer review. The manuscripts are often sloppy, lacking careful proofreading. References are not in the proper format, and the list may not be complete with the citations provided in the text. Figures may be out of order. Spelling and grammatical mistakes are abundant.

The great scientist of fluid mechanics, G. K. Batchelor, once wrote,

“Reading a paper is a voluntary and demanding task, and a reader needs to be enticed and helped and stimulated by the author.”

Your job as an author is to make the job as easy on the readers (through the persona of the peer reviewer) as you can.  Peer reviewers help you improve your manuscript without pay or recognition.  Reviewers, editors and publishing staff do not have the time available to edit manuscripts that require extensive grammatical changes.  Manuscripts not in an acceptable state may be returned unreviewed or rejected.

Even if such a manuscript went out for peer review, the reviewers will not be in a happy frame of mind when reading your manuscript.

A related issue is that all coauthors must contribute to the writing and editing of the manuscript. When a manuscript is published, coauthors receive the credit, so they must contribute to the responsibility of preparing the manuscript for peer review. So, if a manuscript is all non-native English speakers and one native English speaker, the onus is on the native English speaker to do the final proofreading of the manuscript to ensure it has proper grammar and spelling.

In that sense, lead authors should not submit a manuscript until all coauthors approve of the version to be submitted. If there are deadlines, they need to be properly managed to allow all coauthors sufficient time to provide feedback. Journals expect that all authors have read and approved the submitted version of the manuscript. (Indeed, some journals require the corresponding author to sign a form attesting so.) Therefore, all authors must take their job seriously.

Take the pledge: Sell no manuscript before its time.