The EMBO Journal: fate of manuscripts submitted to, but rejected by the Journal in 2006
- Overall statistics of submitted manuscript
- Where rejected manuscripts were published
- Citation performance
- Decision process at The EMBO Journal
In July 2008 The EMBO Journal performed an in-depth analysis of the editorial process, of the decisions made on each manuscript submitted in 2006 and of the eventual fate of each rejected manuscript in terms of whether and where it had been subsequently published.
As part of the analysis PubMed searches were performed for each manuscript rejected in 2006 based on the title keywords and the names of the first and last authors on the original manuscript submitted to The EMBO Journal. In order to capture as many rejected manuscripts as possible, relatively non-stringent criteria were used initially to retrieve papers with similarity to the original study. Searches were then refined by manual comparison of abstract, and - if necessary - article full text. Once identified the corresponding papers were cross-referenced in Thomson ISI's Web of Knowledge and the number of citations gathered and recorded. Clearly, citations (particularly in a relatively short timeframe) and impact factors do not directly display the importance or insight of papers and we do not in any way mean to imply this. We have simply used them as convenient numbers to enable comparisons between papers published in different journals.
Overall statistics of submitted manuscripts
Top of page3200 submitted manuscripts in 2006
520 manuscripts were published by The EMBO Journal
2640 manuscripts were rejected
2169 of the rejected manuscripts found to have PubMed records, of which 2067 of them were also listed in ISI Web of Knowledge (Thomson Reuters) as of July 2008.
Where rejected manuscripts were published
Top of pageOf all rejected manuscripts submitted in 2006:
18% had not been published in a recognizable form (ie. listed in Pubmed) by July 2008 or not listed in ISI
79% were published in journals with a lower impact factor than The EMBO Journal (IF 10.09 – in 2006). These were spread across a total of 240 different journals. Most popular destinations were Journal of Biological Chemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology publishing 22% of the manuscripts rejected from The EMBO Journal.
3% were published in a journal with a higher impact factor, with the Journal of Cell Biology and Blood together accounting for two thirds.
In many cases the abstract and content of the published manuscript had been changed significantly from the one received at The EMBO Journal and published a long time after the original submission date in 2006. In several cases studies published in higher impact factor journals were published in 2008 suggesting the incorporation of significant additional experimental data.
Citation performance
Top of pageTo directly compare citations of manuscripts that were published in between 2006 and July 2008 the number of citations were normalized to the number of months since publication. The number of citations per month for each manuscript rejected from The EMBO Journal was subsequently compared to the average number of citations of papers published in the journal during the same time frame.
90% of papers published in other journals cite less (citations per month after publication date) than the average paper accepted in The EMBO Journal during 2006. 10% of those published in other journals cite more that the average EMBO J paper.
It is interesting to note that there is very little correlation between the citation number of the higher cited rejected papers and the impact factor of the journal in which they were published. Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of rejected manuscripts eventually published in higher impact journals still, on average, cite less well than the average EMBO J paper.
Decision process at The EMBO Journal
Top of pageOf the total rejected manuscripts, 40% were rejected after review or on the basis of advice from the Journal's Advisory Editorial Board, with initial editorial rejections accounting for 60%. Of the rejected manuscripts eventually published in higher impact journals, 49% were rejected after review or on the basis of Board advice.
