Final comment
Getting your work published can be both a stressful and rewarding endeavour. I do not profess to be an expert in how to do that efficiently. All I can do is provide the reader with what I observe in my role as an editor. That role has given me an appreciation for the various pitfalls in preparing a manuscript. It has also given me the tools to reflect on some of the errors I have made in trying to get my own work published. We all think our work is worthy of publication and do not always appreciate that what our audience sees in our submitted work may be different than what we intended to communicate. I hope that what I express here will help authors close that gap.
Footnotes
1. Incidentally, while writing this editorial I received an email from a prominent medical school advertising a certificate program focused on “Effective Writing for Health Care”. It would appear that I am not alone in my impression that there is a gap in training related to manuscript writing.
2. What I discuss in this editorial stems from a series of invited presentations I delivered over the past year in Canada and South Africa on how to get your work published.
3. I know of authors who take an “it’s good enough, let’s deal with (known or unknown) issues after review”, or a “let’s see what happens”, or worse, a “let’s see what the community thinks before we settle on a final manuscript (which we will then submit to the journal that we really want it published in)” attitude when submitting work. Those authors seem to think of the peer review process as some sort of proofreading service or feel it appropriate to distribute the effort of scholarship to a community of colleagues who will not receive credit for their contribution (e.g. providing input on how the data should be analyzed and presented, how the argument should be framed, etc.). Perhaps it is the ease by which manuscripts can be submitted and processed that drives such behaviour (which adds significantly to the labour of an already thinly stretched reviewer base). The first manuscript I ever submitted to a journal was sent (via conventional mail service) in a package that included 3 printed copies and high resolution images on a compact disc. The receiving editor would mail one of the printed copies to a potential reviewer. If that reviewer declined, the manuscript would be sent back to the editor, who would then need to write to another expert for review. Given the time a manuscript would be in review, the cost and effort to prepare and mail the package to be submitted, and a concern that my work would become outdated (or “scooped”) if I was required to “shop” it around to several journals, I was diligent to put my best work forward with the initial submission (and only submit work that I felt would be received as a contribution to advancing knowledge). I suspect that was a common attitude prior to the proliferation of the internet.
4. The term “scientist” was coined by William Whewell almost 300 years after the start of the period often referred to as the “Scientific Revolution”, and almost two centuries after Boyle’s investigations.
5. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/stats/cit_added.html, accessed on December 5, 2019.