The new way that journals try to reduce their workload of refereeing papers is to solicit an abstract to be sent as a presubmission enquiry. I recently had a presubmission enquiry turned down by a journal, only to be phoned weeks later and told that they had changed their minds and would now like to review my paper. The justification was that an editor had been to a recent meeting in this subject area, and it was considered quite trendy. I had already sent my paper elsewhere, having found another journal where the editor had probably been to a meeting at an earlier date that suggested the trendiness of the work (i.e. the paper passed the presubmission stage). I have sympathy for overworked editors who clearly cannot send out every paper for review, but, equally, I was struck by the randomness of it all.
Scientists may like presubmission enquiries, in that they will save us time – one doesn’t to have to format a manuscript according to each journal’s specifications without at least having the assurance of a review – but I question the usefulness and fairness of this practice. The criteria for sending a paper out to review will necessarily be completely different from those for accepting any one manuscript. The pre-referees are given only the title of the study, the names of the authors and an abstract. The criteria will therefore probably be the following.
(1) Are these cool people?
(2) Are they working on something fashionable (i.e. are key buzzwords present in the title and abstract)?
(3) Does their work directly interest me (e.g. would I enjoy reviewing this paper)?
These are perhaps some of the worst criteria for judging whether or not to review a paper. They take the current trends of judging science by fashion, rather than quality, to its extreme.
Take point number 1: Are these cool people? How many of us have moaned that if only we had the famous Nobel Laureate Prof. Sir X on our paper it would have been accepted by a higher- impact-factor journal? How many of us have reviewed a paper and found the results somewhat dubious or shaky but given the authors the benefit of the doubt because work ‘from that lab’ is probably of very high quality? Do we really want journals to send out our names to a few of our peers who will glance for five minutes over our last three-person-years worth of work and decide if any of the names on our paper rank highly enough for our paper to be worthy of review? Perhaps we could pay people with high-impact names to let us use them as authors for a presubmission enquiry? This might help our chances of at least getting someone to look at our work and thus eventually increase our own personal impact factor.
Take point number 2: Are they working on something fashionable? If we only have the information in the title and abstract of a paper, we are really being asked to give an impression not of the quality of the science but of how many bells and whistles are set off in our mind by key words and phrases. This part of the judgement will mostly be influenced by recent experiences, such as the latest meeting we attended or what we read at breakfast that morning in our favourite science magazine. While some might argue that this is a valid criterion for selection, it seems more likely that it forces scientists to become followers who rush around trying to find out what is cool right now so that they too can work on it. This criterion eliminates any pioneering or truly novel work, because by definition this work won’t be trendy yet. It also eliminates any work that deals with the mundane business of trying to understand how that new signalling pathway proposed last month actually works in cells in a physiological setting.
Lastly, point number 3 is perhaps the most cynical of all: Does the work interest me? My personal experience with presubmission enquiries has been that, immediately following my recommending that the journal should review a paper, they always come back and ask me to be the referee! So, if I find the work worthy but a touch dull, or if I’ve had a really busy week, it’s a bit tempting to give a negative reply to the presubmission!
A bit less cynical is the idea that of course we all find our own work the most interesting (or we’d be doing something else), and so we will naturally judge others’ work partially by how closely it matches our own ideas and thoughts about our field.
What can we do about it? We could refuse to make presubmission enquiries, and we could refuse to act as presubmission referees. Only this would force the journals to take a look at this practice and consider alternatives. We could also write a letter to the journals and discourage this practice. We need to publish our work in high quality journals to survive in science, but we don’t need to let them set all of the rules. However, nothing will work unless we achieve a consensus. The journals and the scientists need each other; so the power to decide how we will judge each other is really in our hands.
