Chapeau
January 14, 2015
Occasionally you notice one of your colleagues pulling off something you hope for within your own group.
When your manuscript gets rejected from one journal you would typically submit it to an approximately equal* journal next, hoping to get a more favorable mix of AE and reviewers.
If you’ve worked up more data that could conceivable fit with the rejected set, maybe you would submit upward, trying a journal with a better reputation.
What is slightly less-usual is taking the same manuscript, essentially unrevised and submitting it to a journal of better reputation or JIF or whathave you.
Getting that self-same manuscript accepted, essentially unchanged, is a big win.
Chapaeau, my friends.
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*You do this, right?
DrugMonkey 
January 14, 2015 at 12:17 pm
What is slightly less-usual is taking the same manuscript, essentially unrevised and submitting it to a journal of better reputation or JIF or whathave you.
Getting that self-same manuscript accepted, essentially unchanged, is a big win.
I’ve done that successfully once. From rejected at IF ~2-3 to accepted at IF ~7-8.
Good times…
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January 14, 2015 at 2:10 pm
Yes indeed….though only with papers I’m convinced are exceptional.
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January 14, 2015 at 3:13 pm
When your manuscript gets rejected from one journal you would typically submit it to an approximately equal* journal next
Only if the reviewers were out to lunch. In my field when authors find the criticisms valid, they usually apply the fixes and go down one notch in venue.
In the past (i.e. 15+ years ago) it was very rare to resubmit to a similar level journal. As reviewing loads have gone up, quality of reviews has gone down and resubmission to an equivalent venue is more and more common.
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January 14, 2015 at 3:18 pm
I’m trying to do this right now.
Bumped from Plos Comp Biol, submitted nearly unchanged to Cerebral Cortex. Reviews seem quite positive, except for one reviewer out of 4 who just didn’t get it. Editor invited us to revise and resubmit. We’ll see.
(I nearly fell from my chair when I saw that Cerebral Cortex has higher IF than Journal of Neuroscience. What has the world come to?)
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January 14, 2015 at 3:51 pm
The dismal fate of J Neuro’s JIF is the direct result of Glamour Humping. The invention of Nat Neuro and Neuron caused an immediate and unrelieved downward trend.
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January 14, 2015 at 3:54 pm
Busy- perhaps the relative influence of JIF has changed the contingencies for authors?
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January 14, 2015 at 4:32 pm
J Neuro was 7.2 in 2009/2010 and is now 6.7. On the face of it, not too bad, but Neuron has gone from around 13 to 16 in the same time period. Nat Neuro has remained relatively flat though. Older journals seem to be suffering a little from IF stagnation or decline (FASEB J, JBC)
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January 14, 2015 at 4:58 pm
The decline has been steady and unrelenting ever since NN and Neuron were invented. Check the long trend, dude.
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January 14, 2015 at 5:34 pm
I wonder how often reviewers get the same manuscript from the Glamour hunters via different editors. My former boss always submitted to Science, then Nature, then Cell. Often with very little revisions (and very little success), so I imagine the leaders in that field had to see these papers more than once on that rotation.
Has this happened to you guys?
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January 14, 2015 at 10:32 pm
I see papers again all the time. Nothing kills a paper faster than not implementing reasonable minor recommendations. I mean, if one asks the authors to redo the entire study it is not surprising if they don’t, but if one asks for a muddled paragraph to be rewritten and they don’t, the paper is pretty much DOA.
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January 20, 2015 at 10:57 am
I’m done submitting to J Neuro. The combination of endless experiment requests due to unlimited space and no supp info, additional reviewers, plus having to PAY just to submit, all on top of a shrinking IF? No thanks.
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January 20, 2015 at 2:46 pm
That is very interesting Dr Becca. Because I would have thought one of the purposes of banning Supplemental Materials was to rein in reviewer demands for additional experiments.
You are suggesting you think it has worked in the opposite direction, I take it? That reviewers are even more keen to demand additional work?
J Neuro:
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January 20, 2015 at 2:53 pm
@DM and Becca:
Yes this seems standard practice for J Neuro reviewers–even though the instructions to the reviewers suggests otherwise.
Also I speculate that this may be wishful thinking on the part of the Editors and Reviewers that somehow by forcing more experiments the papers might be more ‘definitive and impactful’.
I doubt that this will be the outcome (e.g. boosting IF by mandating more experiments).
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