Scientists: Do You Really Want Your Papers Published?

Have you had any papers rejected by reputable journals recently? Or even by the less reputable journals you were forced to send the paper to when its revolutionary importance was not appreciated by earlier reviewers? If so, consider this: Perhaps—even given the enormous effort that went into submitting the grant application, preparing the protocol, and writing the paper (and even conducting the research itself)— you never really wanted the paper published in the first place. At least that’s my opinion, based on my experiences as an editor. Indeed, over the years, it has become apparent to me that much of the material submitted forpublication is actually not intended for publication. This is the only way I can explain why the style of a majority of submitted papers is not in the format of the journal concerned, and why a very high percentage of papers are rejected by reputable journals. The strategy behind making such a submission is not readily obvious, but factors in the strategy might include: (1) cunning—keeping key reviewers occupied while you pursue competitive research; (2) spite—damaging the reputation of the head of department; or (3) revenge—making the editor work harder for shortening your last paper by 19 pages. To assist those scientists who are intent on never having their submitted papers published, I have prepared a guide for writing a really lousy paper. The spontaneous assistance of authors of many papers submitted to various biomedical joumals is gratefully acknowledged. Title Page It is difficult to avoid giving atitle to a paper, and as absence of a title page might be assumed by an editor to be due to the chaos of his own editorial, office, omission is not of much help in having your paper rejected. A better ploy is to ensure that the title page bears as little relation to the rest of the paper as possible and that it completely misrepresents the results. The title should run to at least seven or eight lines, alternate capriciously between lowercase and uppercase letters, and misspell a couple of curiously obscure or archaic words. The title page should also include authors’ names, and you may feel reluctant to make errors here, particularly as this maybe the only part of the paper your coauthors will read. You can, however, give first names in full if the journal uses only initials, or initials if it uses first names. Try varying the style a little, and be sure to give degrees and diplomas in profusion if they are not required. The authors’ names can be embellished by a glittering array of superscript numbers and letters (Roman, Greek, Arabic, and Cyrillic), together with asterisks, obelisks, and daggers. (Adding your home address is a nice touch this is sure to imprint in the editor’s mind how far you have been banished from the institute where your research was done.) Second Page This is the place for the summary, particularly if the old-world journal you are submitting to puts the summmary at theend. A useful trick for the summary is to omit it, though perhaps this is done too often to enhance your chances of rejection very much. Also, since this is page 2, number it page 1. Better yet: Have your word processor number it something like “PH436X0888-a-l.” Introduction This is the first opportunity you will have to write a Discussion section for your paper. Confine yourself to literature not generally relevant to the paper. Do not attempt to give aims. (It is so unusual for scientific papers to state aims that the reviewers and editors might be misled into accepting your paper.) This is also the place to begin the destructive and tiring task of introducing multiple, and confusing, abbreviations. For example, if you are discussing automated indium-derived spectroscopy, call it AIDS for short. Methods This section offers greater opportunity for having your paper rejected than any other. But beware: Experienced reviewers are so used to judging papers despite a paucity of methodologic detail that they become experts at divining exactly what has been done from the most scanty account. Therefore, you need to boldly set out the deficiencies of your protocol, pointedly using, for example, autoradiography to develop the results of your studies using non radioactive reagents. If detailed methodology is given in table or figure legends, ensure that these are transposed, and lift one of the figures from your not-quite-similar previous paper. Do ensure that your use of “at random” clearly means that the animals were selected as being excess to other workers’ requrements, and that the “control group” was studied five months later, between power outages during the Christmas vacation. Details of analytical method should not be given, except by references to obscure Spanish books, long out of print. Certainly avoid useful information such as normal ranges or interassay coefficients of variation. The situation is, of course, complicated by your change of laboratory halfway through the study. Make this crystal clear, without hinting that you considered the possible consequences. Results This section is better termed Results and Preliminary Discussion, and often contains the only discussion relevant to the paper. Begin each paragraph with the extensive methodology you forgot to put in the Methods section. Give here also the characteristics of the ores, quasars, animals, or patients that should have been inthe Methods, but vary the numbers studied by a factor of 1.7 from those you stated earlier. Omit anything relevant to the original hypothesis, and pounce victoriously on any relationship where p is (thankfully) less than .05. Complement the Results section by a profusion of figures, in a multitude of clashing styles, from several art departments or graphics packages. Clutter the figures with incidental and irrelevant materials. Transpose the legends for Figures 8 and 13. Discussion Here you have a number of options. Having reviewed the world literature in the Introduction you may feel inhibited about doing the same again, but this rarely seems to stop your colleagues. Remember not to mention the results of the present paper, but lay out the extent of your ignorance over eight to 10 pages. Alternatively, repeat the Results section, laying further emphasis on nonsignificant trends, and speculating wildly from them with scant regard to the published literature. Take care to be totally uncritical about your own study, while scornfully dismissing a couple of the key papers in the literature. With any luck these will be from one or both reviewers. If you believe that you can spot the potential reviewers, then subtly misspell their names in the reference list, transpose their initials, or at least get. the last page number ridiculously wrong. A few final tips: (1) Do not discuss the manuscript with any of the coauthors—they may improve it; (2) Certainly do not show itto the head of your department, unless you can be sure that it will be read under the influence of bourbon and jet lag on his next trip back from Tokyo; (3) Randomize pages 28 and 30 between the stapled copies of the paper you submit to the journal; and (4) Forge the signatures on the copyright transfer, particularly inexpertly for the best-known member of the team. P.D. Home is a senior lecturer in the department of medicine at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.

Scientists: Do You Really Want Your Papers Published?

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