Follow-up analysis of rejected manuscripts submitted to The EMBO Journal in 2007:
- Overall statistics
- Destinations of rejected manuscripts
- Average citations of accepted vs rejected manuscripts
In July 2009, The EMBO Journal carried out a follow-up analysis of the publication fates of all manuscripts submitted to, and rejected from, the journal during the year 2007. Briefly, this analysis involves semi-automated PubMed searches for respective author sets and/or keywords of the original rejected submission, followed by refinement through case-by-case comparisons of abstracts and, if necessary, additional tools. As a rough approximation of the perceived impact of each publication assigned in this manner, average monthly citations numbers are extracted from the ISI Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) where available. Aims of this analysis include validation of the editorial and peer-review decision making process, as well as the identification and analysis of cases where studies of appreciable impact may not have been selected by the Journal.
Overall statistics
Top of page| manuscripts submitted to The EMBO Journal in 2007 | 3184 |
|---|---|
| accepted | 325 |
| rejected | 2849 |
| rejected manuscripts found in PubMed (July 2009) | 2403 |
| rejected manuscripts listed in ISI Web of Science (July 2009) | 2282 |
| apparently unpublished (as of July 2009) | 446 |
Destinations of rejected manuscripts
Top of pageArticles rejected by The EMBO Journal in 2007 were published in a total of 244 different target journals, which were grouped according to their 2007 Impact Factor (IF) into three categories of ‘high IF’, ‘comparable IF’ (IF between 8 and 11), and ‘lower IF’ simply to facilitate comparisons.
| rejected papers in | notes | |
|---|---|---|
| high IF journals (>11) | 1.2% | 35 papers in total, 13 rejected after review, 5 after Editorial Board Advice |
| comparable IF (8-11) | 10% | |
| lower IF journals (>8) | 73% | J Biol Chem, Mol Cell Biol, Mol Biol Cell account for 29% of all published EMBO J rejections |
| not published | 16% |
Average citations of accepted vs rejected manuscripts
Top of page| Average citation of 2007 submissions published in EMBO J | 0.50 times/month |
|---|---|
| Average citation of 2007 rejected papers published elsewhere | 0.26 times/month |
226 of the 2282 ISI-listed rejections published elsewhere were cited more than the EMBO J average of 0.50 citations/month.
Of these, 176 actually appeared in journals of the ‘lower IF’ group, while only 8 out of the 35 manuscripts in the ‘high IF’ group garnered more than 0.5 citations/month, with this lack of clear correlation indicating the general difficulties in predicting the interest in every case of submission.
Comparison with the respective analysis of 2006 submissions indicates that an increase in rejection rate (from 83% in 2006 to 89% in 2007) has not resulted in a greater number of rejections of higher-citing papers (10% of all rejections in 2006 vs. 8% in 2007).
