Gauging the likelihood for acceptance of a paper submitted to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Allan D. Pierce Acoustical Society of America! May 17, 2012! Hong Kong!
To write or not to write?! To submit or not to submit?! Can you trust the editors and the reviewers?! Can you trust the system?! What motivates people who submit papers to journals?!
Before you start writing:! You think you may have something or are on the verge of having something that you feel will be of long-term interest to some of your present or future professional colleagues.! Do a careful study of papers in JASA and other journals that are on related subjects!
SELECTING THE JOURNAL! Where is your sort of stuff frequently published?! What sort of company would you be keeping?! How much do you care about the shelf life of your article?! Where would the article be most likely to be noticed and read by people you respect?! How accessible will your paper be to the wider group of people you would want to read it?! What is the journal s general reputation for handling of papers?! Do you know the editors? Do you have any respect for the editors? Do you have any empathy with the editors?!
SELECTING THE JOURNAL! Good approach is to choose the journal which you cite the most.! Then you may possibly get the most readers.! If you did the bulk of the research before doing a careful literature search, start looking at various likely journals and try to find reports of research like yours.!
The literature search Limit search to! Work on which your paper builds! Strongly relevant prior work! Work presenting competing ideas! Work that you need to cite to show how your work ties into other contemporary work! DON T plan on writing a review paper! Limit number of references to what you would reasonably expect your readers (or at least some of them) to be willing to read!
BE COLLEGIAL After you have made tentative choice of journal where you wish to publish your still-unwritten article! Look through the last few years of the journal! Find articles that have some tie-in with your intended subject matter! Read those articles and think about whether or how you might cite them in your paper! If you don t know the authors of the papers you are contemplating citing, initiate a correspondence, ask them questions about related work, perhaps tell about what you are working on! Attend a meeting which some of your targeted colleagues might also attend, perhaps give a talk!
Familiarize yourself with the Journal s style Find some recent papers in the Journal which you especially like! Pay attention to how these papers are laid out, the wording of the titles, the wording of the abstracts, the style of the introduction, the style of the conclusion section! Read those articles and think about whether or how you might cite them in your paper! Every (or almost every) journal has a style manual --- download it and read it assiduously! Make a rough outline of your contemplated paper, putting it into the format that the Journal desires for submitted manuscripts. Start out right.!
Heading off problems! Write paper so that people will REALLY want to read it! Suggest Associate Editor when submitting manuscript! Supply list of potential reviewers! Suggest persons who you are confident the AE will already know! If journal is associated with professional society, make educated guesses as to who might be a member when making up list of possible reviewers! If submitting paper to a journal associated with a professional society and if you plan on submitting more papers in the future, join the society!
Let us assume you have the time to write something up and to submit it to JASA! What makes you think that it is going to be accepted?! Hard cold fact is that about 40% of all papers are rejected, and JASA likes to keep it that way.! For papers from some parts of the world, as much as 90% of submitted papers are rejected.! What did these authors do wrong?!
Welcome to peer review! No one pretends that [the peer-review system] is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that [it] is the worst [system], except all those other [systems] that have been tried from time to time.
In many cases the paper is rejected simply because the editor and/or reviewers think that JASA is not the most appropriate journal! Strong indicator is that the paper contains no references to previously published papers in JASA! JASA is 83 years old, has published approximately 40,000 articles, and you couldn t find at least one of these to be worth citing!! If you can t find any previous paper in JASA worth citing, don t submit to JASA.!
Suppose you have set your heart on publishing in JASA, but you don t have extensive access to JASA, what do you do?! Join the ASA --- very inexpensive if you want online access only. Extremely inexpensive if you are a student.! Get online library privileges from an institutional library which has a subscription to JASA! If you are really destitute and can t do either of the above, send an e-mail note to some officer of the ASA, and let the ASA figure out how to help you. (AND WE PROBABLY WILL!)!
There is always a chance that your paper might be rejected because the topic is outside the de facto scope of JASA! Being acoustics is not enough.! Spotting a related paper published in JASA is not enough.! The Journal must find a willing Associate Editor (AE)! Usually, no willing AE means reject with regrets! The AE will want to get reviews from disinterested persons that the AE knows, respects, and trusts.! Don t submit a paper to JASA unless you are fairly sure that it will find a willing Associate Editor who probably knows competent reviewers who can understand the paper in depth.!
Proactive steps an author can take! Submit a cover letter stating why the authors selected JASA for a publication outlet.! Honestly explain any prior attempts to get the paper published.! Give a prioritized list of suggested Associate Editors.! Give a list of suggested reviewers.! Make sure that your suggested reviewers are persons that the AE will know and are persons with no conflicts of interest.! Send electronic preprints to possible s informing them and asking for advice!
In some cases the paper is rejected because it is so poorly written that it would be an embarrassment to publish it! Having English as your native language just isn t enough.! If it isn t your native language, then you will have to either work harder or get help. (The ASA will supply names of willing people to help you if you ask.)! If you have a reasonable high school training in English as a foreign language, then you are possibly all right.! But don t wing it! Get hold of two good dictionaries, your language to English, and a proper English dictionary. Know how to use these dictionaries, and use them constantly while writing.!
Get good books on English grammar and punctuation and refer to them constantly! Do this even if English is your first language, or even if you know English very well.!
Extremely! important! The paper has to be intelligible ---- understandable! It is not enough for the English to be correct.! Intelligible to the editor and the reviewers.! If your work looks nothing like anything previously published in JASA, you will have an uphill battle to make it seem intelligible to the editors and reviewers.! If your paper is not well organized, it will not seem intelligible.! Being intelligible to your immediate colleagues is not enough.! Avoid acronyms and author defined terms!
Extremely! important! Papers that contain unsupported statements are very likely to be rejected! Don t try to browbeat or BS your readers.! Every statement must follow logically from the preceding statements.! If you can t support an assertion, clearly state so, and carefully give your reasons.! Avoid statements such as it can be shown. Instead explain in words just how one might go about showing it.! Never write a it is assumed that. Possibly write the present discussion is limited to the particular case where..!
Your paper has to be of moderately wide interest to many readers or it will be rejected! Case studies usually get rejected.! If you study something highly specific, you have to made a good effort to generalize your results.! If you have only some specific results and no theoretical inferences as to how they might be generalized, the paper will likely be rejected.! Never write it is assumed that. Possibly write the present discussion is limited to the particular case where..!
You must make a strong case that the gist of your paper is original if you want it to be accepted! A typical reviewer will ask hasn t that been done before?! The paper may be rejected even if the reviewers only suspect lack of originality, but don t expressly prove it.! One way of heading off this type of criticism is to intelligently discuss previous papers in the literature and show how that work is different from what you are reporting.!
Papers with poor literature surveys are likely to be rejected! Go back and do your homework.! Work should be tied in to other published work, not just that done by author and colleagues! If all or almost all of your references are to yourself or your colleagues, the paper may be rejected. No reviewer should feel that it is necessary to read many papers by the same author.!
What about papers of an intensely mathematical nature?! Uphill battle. Reviewers must be convinced it is worthwhile to go through the steps in detail or at least be convinced that the final result(s) make sense.! If your end result is just a bunch of equations devoid of physical insight, the paper is likely to be rejected! If you leave out intermediate steps without at least suggesting how they might be filled in, the paper may be rejected.! Usually fatal if you start out with some obscure mathematical theory and blithely assume reviewers will be familiar with them.!
One paper ---- one message Limit scope of paper! One overall message (or theme)! Bad example: Recent work at the Wonky lab on sound! Bad example: Two methods for measuring the speed of sound! Bad example: Noise control in Lower Slovobia! Plan on writing a paper as short and concise as possible, but not shorter!
What can go wrong! Paper submitted electronically! Manuscript manager examines paper for quality! Paper flunks quality check! Paper passes quality check! Manuscript manager seeks to recruit Associate Editor! N Associate Editors asked in succession to handle paper! None of the N are willing!
What else can go wrong! Associate Editor recruited! Associate Editor looks over paper! Decides paper is clearly not suitable! Rejection decision letter sent out! Associate Editor tries to identify competent reviewers! Associate Editor can t think of anyone! Associate Editor feels uncomfortable with making unilateral decision! Paper judged outside the de facto scope of Journal!
Still more that can go wrong! Associate Editor identifies possible competent reviewers! Reviewers asked, possibly in succession! Some reviewers ignore the request! The rest refuse to review the paper! Some reviewers agree to do a review! Time passes, no reviews received! Reviewers politely reminded, more time passes! Associate Editor gives up on the reviewers!
What irritates editors and reviewers! Poorly written or overly vague title! Abstracts that say nothing! Acronyms! Block citations of many papers at a time! Introductions that don t tell you what the paper is all about! Start-off assuming that reader is fully cognizant with some obscure previous paper! Show and tell philosophy of presentation. (Usually accompanied with over abundance of figures.)! Over abundance of examples and special cases.! Absence of meaningful conclusions!
The ASA has a document downloadable from the site! http://asadl.org/jasa/for_authors_jasa! with the link Submission and manuscript problems! Title of document is! List of potential problems with papers submitted to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America!