Myths and rumours in scientific publishing

Abstract

Having been engaged for long daily hours, maybe for years, sometimes also emotionally involved in a large and resource consuming research project, an author from time to time is left with a kind of strange, unfamiliar and maybe empty feeling when the manuscript has been submitted to a scientific journal. What happens to my manuscript? Is it treated well? Is it treated fairly? How come it takes such a long time before I get a response? In that situation, you are very susceptible to myths and rumours. Some of these reach the editorial board, as is the case for Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. Let us illustrate this with a few examples. A member of the board participated in a scientific meeting. During the dinner, a colleague mentioned that manuscripts from a given country (his own) were not welcomed at Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. The Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica board member could immediately reject that rumour. What matters first of all is originality and quality of a manuscript. To illustrate our recent publication profile regarding country of origin Fig. 1 shows the origin of the publications in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica for the 2-year period January 2004–December 2005 as regards original articles, review articles, clinical overview articles, brief communications and case reports, in total 229 publications from 27 countries. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica published 229 articles from 27 countries during the two year period January 2004 – December 2005. Besides the above mentioned criteria for originality and quality, there is another major influence: fixed number of pages available for printing, i.e. when receiving more papers than we have pages available for printing, several papers (also good papers) regrettably cannot be published. Then a few more criteria besides the ones for originality and quality are taken into consideration, such as how many papers have been published recently within the same topic, what is in the pipeline for future issues, is the manuscript of broad relevance or is it more suited for a regional journal, maybe a specialized journal? The number of manuscripts received by Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica is shown in Fig. 2. During the 10 month period from January 1 2005–October 31 2005, we received 532 manuscripts which bring us to approximately 630 for the 1-year period January 1 2005–December 31 2005. The acceptance rate is very much dependent on the number of papers received (as the annual number of articles published is more or less fixed between 110 and 120). The acceptance percentage is illustrated in Fig. 3 (supplements are not included in the statistics). During the 10-month period January 2005 – October 2005 Acta Psychiatrica Sandinavica received 532 manuscripts from 45 countries. Manuscripts published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica in each 6-month period divided by the number of manuscripts received in the respective 6-month periods (modified accept percentage). This is not true. From Fig. 1, it can be seen from which low- and middle-income countries Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica has published for the 2-year period January 2004–December 2005. Fig. 2 also shows the country of origin for submitted manuscripts for January 2005–October 2005. It should be noted that 1, 2 cannot be compared. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica is very pleased to publish papers from low- and middle-income countries, but we are not prepared to compromise on quality, which would not do any good to the scientific reputation of low- and middle-income countries. The matter has been, and is, intensively debated. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica is participating in this debate, e.g. (1-5). What this journal is doing in order to support psychiatric research from low- and middle-income countries is to set the threshold for papers to be sent for review a little lower as regards contributions from these countries. This helps research colleagues from centres with limited experience and resources to qualify their manuscripts in the long run (2, 3). What could be done is to provide international support from centres with resources and experience to less experienced and less resourceful centres from low- and middle-income countries organized by international organizations, improving the full process of designing and performing research work (2, 3) (not by publishing papers of lower quality). However, one should be very careful when using the dichotomy high-income countries vs. low- and middle-income countries. In the editorial office of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, we see very good contributions from low- and middle-income countries, e.g. (6-9) and of course some papers of not so high quality, just as we see papers of good quality from high-income countries and of course papers of not so high quality, previously discussed by Sartorius (10). Finally, a puzzling experience. We now and then receive papers reporting from very good research done in centres with limited resources in low- and middle-income countries. The research projects have been designed and performed on location involving local colleagues, local patients, the local environment and using local resources but the corresponding address is a highly esteemed Western research centre (where the principal investigator holds a shorter or longer scholarship?). Sometimes we ask the principal investigator to give the local centre, where the research has been performed, the full credit by using the local low- or middle-income country address as the corresponding address. Occasionally, the principal investigator changes the address but quite often he insists on using the highly esteemed centre as the corresponding address. On this background, it is a bit difficult to understand why scientific journals should give priority to low- and middle-income countries when authors coming from these countries are not prepared to do so. It happens now and then that a rumour circulates that the impact factor of this or that journal (also Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica) has been decreasing now for years. For Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, which is a general psychiatric journal, we have seen an increase over the past 10 years with a very minor stagnation in 2004. The matter in 2004 is not because of decreasing number of citations (the numerator of the impact factor equation), but because of the publication of several supplements. Some kinds of supplement publication are not quoted very often but they are all included in the denominator of the impact factor equation. Despite this (sometimes negative) influence on the impact factor, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica is still pleased to publish supplements because it gives a possibility for an international circulation of information, which is not always suited for ordinary publication. When talking about impact factor, we ask our readers to pay attention to other bibliometric statistics for Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica shown in Table 1. This regards the total number of citations, impact factor, immediacy factor and cited half-life, all for 2004. The ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) publishes these statistics every year, in the case for journals grouped under the theme: psychiatry. Every journal is ranked from highest to lowest of the total number of journals in the group which for 2004 covered 90 journals. As this latter number varies from year to year, we standardized the ranking on a scale from 0.00 to 1.00 (1.00 as the best) in Table 1 following the equation: 1 – (r−1)/(n−1). The Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica impact factor (1993–2004) is presented in Fig. 4. Impact factor of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 1993 – 2004. Having an electronic subscription to Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, personal, institutional or via a consortia access opens the possibility for downloading Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica publications. Figure 5 shows the number of downloads year by year since 2002; this service became available early in 2000. The statistics concerning 2005 cover the period January 1 to November 10. The table and graph above show the number of times Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica articles were downloaded online through Synergy and other online hosts from 2002 to 2005. The 2005 figure is an expected figure, based on the assumption that the number of downloads in the fourth quarter will equal the average number of downloads in the each of the first three quarters. Top downloaded articles in 2005: Obsessive–compulsive disorder: a critical review of therapeutic perspectives by K. Schruers, K. Koning, J. Luermans, M. J. Haack, E. Griez. Volume 111, Issue 4, Page 261 – April 2005. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0447.2004.00502.x Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants and the risk of suicide: a controlled forensic database study of 14 857 suicides by G. Isacsson, P. Holmgren, J. Ahlner. Volume 111, Issue 4, Page 286 – April 2005. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0447.2004.00504.x Identifying women at-risk for postpartum depression in the immediate postpartum period by C-L. E. Dennis, P. A. Janssen, J. Singer. Volume 110, Issue 5, Page 338 – November 2004. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0447.2004.00337.x This service was introduced in the middle of 2004. In 2005, we had an average registration rate of 39% among authors invited to register to track their article through Author Services. Our goal is to increase this to 60% during 2006. The Author Services website also includes further resources for authors, for example, information on artwork submission, file types, copyright, and how to link to articles on Blackwell Synergy, as well as links to journal specific Author Guidelines. See http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/bauthor. In phase two of Author Services, to be completed during 2006, we will be adding more functionality; for example author surveys, citation information and readership data by article. Blackwell Publishing continues to develop the OnlineEarly service, and has now over 100 journals worldwide where articles appear ahead of issue publication on Blackwell Synergy. It is a fact that for certain journals, publication on OnlineEarly can be a decisive factor in winning authors, and thereby improving the journal's impact factor. The Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica board is a very active and working board. Therefore, we have a rather short turnover for board members’ participation in the work. This year Lars Oreland and Wulf Rössler leave us, and it is our pleasure to thank them for many years of valuable and appreciated contribution to the development of the Journal. At the same time, we welcome Wolfgang Fleischhacker from Innsbruck, Austria, who will support the Journal especially within the field of schizophrenia research and clinical neuropsychopharmacology and antipsychotics; Christoph Lauber from Zurich, Switzerland who has his main interest and expertise within modern social psychiatry and physical illness in mentally disordered, and David Taylor from London, UK, who has his main interests within pharmacokinetics, pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics. Finally, thanking readers, authors, reviewers, board members and the publishers for an enriching and pleasurable collaboration we wish you a happy New Year 2006.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.