Nancy Rothwell

I had some bad news on the research publication front, my research group had a great paper rejected by completely unreasonable referees – they were obviously biased – or at least we think so. More work to do!

Schultz, D. M., 2011: Rejection rates for multiple-part manuscripts. Scientometrics, 86, 251-259. [PDF]

I found that although the rejection rates for multiple-part manuscripts were not that different from the rejection rates for manuscripts as a whole, the reviewer comments about multiple-part manuscripts suggested some ways that authors could avoid those problems in the first place:

“Write manuscripts that are sensibly independent of each other, make minimal reference to unsubmitted manuscripts, and have sufficient and substantiated scientific content within each manuscript.”

Since doing that research, I’ve had discussions with several authors before submission, and I am proud to say that I’ve convinced them to follow a different course: writing sensible manuscripts that are independent of each other. We still get cases of multiple-part manuscripts coming in, though. They are a pain to handle.

Recently, I became aware of a case where Part 1 was submitted to one journal, and Part 2 was submitted to another journal. Part 2 was accepted, yet Part 1 is still in review. This kind of outcome just complicates matters for everyone: authors, editors, reviewers, publishers and readers. Who is the winner here? Is labeling your papers as part of a multiple-part series really worth all this hassle at all stages: peer-review, publication, and post-publication?

What are the indications that you are going to struggle with peer review with your multiple-part paper? (With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy.)

If your two manuscripts are so intertwined that Part I refers to Part II as much as Part II refers back to Part I, you may have a problem in peer review.

If you started writing a paper, only to realize that you have more than the required word-count that you want to say and so start writing a second paper, you may have a problem in peer review.

Simply put, writing a multiple-part manuscript is not easy. Balancing material between the two parts, yet providing enough information so that the reviewers believe they have all the evidence is not easy.

Since publishing that article, I have thought more about what the results from my article in Scientometrics mean. My impression is that high-quality authors could navigate the potential minefield pretty well. They were clever enough to avoid the pitfalls. Mediocre authors struggled to get published because of the particular challenges that writing multiple-part papers required. And, low-quality authors who had trouble getting their single-submission papers published in the first place had little hope of getting a multiple-part paper published.

Personally, I can’t see the benefit in writing multiple-part papers for myself, but I see why some people do it. (Frankly, I think a lot of authors just do it because they have seen it in the literature and do the same thing. In fact, a lot of the literature has that flavor…it worked for Author A, must work for me the same way!)

Some journals ban multiple-part papers. Is it time for the AMS journals to abolish multiple-part papers?

If the results from a recently published article on the factors affecting judges making parole decisions are analogous to that of a journal editor making accept/revise/reject decisions on manuscripts, then send your editor some food and encourage them to take a break.

Danziger, S., J. Levav, and L. Avnaim-Pesso, 2011: Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018033108.

The authors found that “the percentage of favorable rulings [parole granted] drops gradually from about 65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to about 65% after a break.” The figure from the article below tells the whole story.

The authors argue that such external factors affect the presumed judicial impartiality based only upon the facts of the case and the relevant laws.

Do the same outside influences affect editor decisions at journals? Hard to say. Rarely do I have a day where I have to make a large number of decisions in a row. That being said, if I do have several decisions to make, I usually handle the easiest ones first (those tend to be the accept or revise decisions first). Rejections generally involve more weighing of the reviews and the manuscript, require more thought, and take more time to write the decision letter. So, if the same effect happens in journals, it is likely because I ordered my workload that way.

The journals of the American Meteorological Society now require line numbers in submitted manuscripts. How do you add such line numbers to your manuscript? From p. 374 of Eloquent Science: A Practical Guide to Becoming a Better Writer, Speaker and Scientist:

“Final Checks of Your Manuscript,” “Lines numbered in margin”: You may wish to add line numbers for manuscripts that you submit whether or not the journal requires it, making the reviewers’ task easier. In Microsoft Word for Windows, enabling line numbers is under the layout tab. For Microsoft Word for Mac, enabling line numbers is under Format, Document, Layout. For LaTeX, usepackage{lineno} and linenumbers*.

(Image from Elsevier)

This response has always bothered me, but I didn’t know why. After thinking about it recently, now I know why.

This comment is wrong for two reasons. The first is a practical one, the second represents a misunderstanding of how the peer-review process works.

First is the practical issue. Simply, the author has not addressed the reviewer’s comment. By pitting one reviewer against the others rather than providing a sensible response to the reviewer, the author has not provided what is usually requested from the editor: a response to all the reviewers’ concerns. As an editor, I want to hear what the author thinks of all of the reviewers’ comments. I don’t want to hear that because the other two reviewers didn’t raise that issue means that it is irrelevant.

Which leads to me to the second issue: a misunderstanding of the peer-review process. Peer review is not a democracy! Not all reviewers are created equal, whether it be by expertise, experience, or even quality. Thus, I don’t expect the comments provided by one reviewer to overlap the comments provided by another reviewer. (If the comments did overlap all the time, then I wouldn’t need a second reviewer!) For example, Reviewer A might be an expert in statistics, and Reviewers B and C might be experts in synoptic meteorology. If Reviewer A raised an issue about how the statistics were calculated in the manuscript, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Reviewers B and C to pick up on exactly the same point. Yet, that doesn’t mean that the author is absolved from addressing the issue. The editor makes decisions, and I want to ensure that the author has addressed all the reviewer concerns.

There is the issue of what happens if, for example, Reviewers A and B explicitly say that they like section 5 of the manuscript and Reviewer C wants to see it eliminated. In that case, I think an author has more to stand on in siding with the majority, although I still would hope to see a spirited rebuttal of why the section should remain (not just “Reviewers A and B both like this section”) and perhaps some efforts to improve the section to address Reviewer C’s concerns.

What do you think? Do you think it is an acceptable excuse for not addressing reviewers’ comments?

I offered a different perspective. Maybe the author wanted to leave the text so obvious that the meaning to readers would be “look at the foolishness that I have to address in my manuscript just to get the paper past the peer reviewers.”

Regardless of the author’s intent, this is defensive writing, responding to what the reviewers want.

Of course, another perspective is that the author is so insightful and careful a writer that the author addresses potential reviewer concerns before submission. That’s offensive writing.

Interestingly, this discussion with John happened right after I had been meaning to write this blog post about offensive and defensive writing styles. Getting your manuscript published requires submitting high-quality science that is written well. In my view, one of the secrets to receiving good reviews is to spot reviewers’ potential concerns and address them upfront before submission.

Of course, being an offensive writer isn’t easy because you have to anticipate what might reviewers have to say about your own work. Self-inspection does not come easy for some of us, but the papers that I see sail through the peer-review process are those that anticipate their greatest weaknesses and address them before submission. Reviewers have much less to say about these papers.

So, be offensive!

Jargon can be used for several purposes.

• To obscure the real physical processes involved in the weather scenario, possibly because the processes are not known or not quantifiable, but also because the authors are intending to obfuscate their lack of knowledge through the use of the jargon.
• To name some process or feature that hasn’t been described before. Such jargon may be a useful tool to convey a complicated concept with a simple phrase (e.g., cold front), or it may be a way for a selfish author to canonize his or her name in posterity.
• To invoke a colorful term to describe a well-known process. Usually, this is simply to show off.
• To indicate membership in a select group, possibly to exclude others.

Examples of map-room jargon include:

“Strong upper-level dynamics were responsible for the rapidly developing surface cyclone.”: The problem here is the word dynamics (you’ll also see the words support and energy appearing in this context, as well). What does it mean? Strong upper-level vorticity advection? If so, say that. Be more precise in your language.

“The low-level jet played a primary role in the resulting convection.”: Many problems exist with this sentence. First, what does it mean for some object to play “a primary role” in a process (convection) that requires three ingredients to occur (lift, instability, and moisture)? Is the author saying that one is more important than the other? Second, is it even possible to quantify this statement? What is the relative importance of the low-level jet to the convection? If the jet were 5 m/s weaker, would the convection not occur? Third, the exact role the low-level jet played is unstated. Was it the supply of moisture that was important? Was it the low-level wind shear that was important? So, I hope you see that avoiding such words as “role”, “forcing”, “activity”, and others listed in Table 10.4 of Eloquent Science hinder precise scientific communication.

Please, take the pledge with me. Eliminate map-room jargon from your scientific writing, email chat groups, and map-room discussions. If you see someone else using map-room jargon, encourage them to use more physically based thinking and language. By cleaning up our language, we respect the physical processes acting in the atmosphere, we force ourselves to understand the atmosphere better, and we demand higher expectations of ourselves and our colleagues.

Parts of the AGU’s version of these guidelines appear in Eloquent Science (pp. 180-181).

Richardson’s first major scientific contribution was a paper published by the Royal Society of London in 1910: “The approximate arithmetical solutions by finite differences of physical problems involving differential equation, with an application to the stresses in a masonry dam.”

Ashford picks up the story:

“In spite of support from Sir Richard Glazebrook, who had of course been Richardson’s director during his spell at the NPL [National Physical Laboratory], the paper was not accepted by the Society without some difficulty. It had been written in two parts; part A was general while part B dealt with the specific case of a dam. In correspondence with a mathematical friend 40 years later, Richardson recalled that he had been advised by the Society’s Secretary to act on comments made by two referees. ‘Probably he had never read them’, he wrote, ‘for I was appalled to find that the first referee recommended that part A be omitted and B condensed while the second referee recommended that B should be omitted and A condensed! Perceiving that even referees were not infallible, I decided to persist, and after a lot of bother to myself and to other referees I got both parts published.’”