How to read journal instructions for authors

Journal editors often complain that few authors seem to read their instructions for authors. But journals don’t make it easy to read these instructions. Every publisher has its own way of displaying the instructions, with differences in the wording for the same thing, in the order in which information is presented and in how the information is split over web pages.

I’m going to attempt to bring some order to the chaos by picking out the points that really matter. These are:

• Subject areas
• Threshold for significance
• Article types
• Policies
• Length limits
• Article format for submission

There are also some things that nearly all journals require, which I’ll summarise at the end.

Scope

The most important thing to read when you are considering whether to submit to a particular journal is what subject areas it covers. This aspect is pretty straightforward, although it is the only area covered by most commercially available tools for choosing a journal, such as Edanz’s Journal Selector and JANE.

One important aspect to consider, however, is how broad a subject area you would like the journal to cover. If your study will be of interest to readers in more than one field, you will probably want an interdisciplinary journal that covers both fields.

Threshold

There is generally some statement in the instructions for authors or elsewhere in the journal information about the impact, significance or interest threshold. This can be written in all sorts of ways. For example:

• Nature requires that articles “are of outstanding scientific importance” and “reach a conclusion of interest to an interdisciplinary readership”
• Blood takes into account “the originality and importance of the observations or investigations, the quality of the work and validity of the evidence”
• Cell says “The basic criterion for considering papers is whether the results provide significant conceptual advances into, or raise provocative questions and hypotheses regarding, an interesting biological question.”

‘Megajournals’ include a statement that the journal does not select on the basis of perceived impact or significance. For example:

• PLOS ONE says “PLOS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership”
• Frontiers says “Review editors focus on certifying the accuracy and validity of articles, not on evaluating their significance”
• Scientific Reports says “Referees and Editorial Board Members will determine whether a paper is scientifically sound, rather than making judgements on novelty or whether the paper represents a conceptual advance.”
• Biology Open focuses on “publication of good-quality sound research without a requirement for perceived impact”.

If you choose a selective journal rather than a megajournal, it is important to consider carefully whether your study is likely to reach their stated threshold. Get a colleague in another field to read your title and abstract and give an honest view of how groundbreaking they think it is compared with papers in various possible target journals.

You are likely to be biased towards finding your own work fascinating; never forget that editors and reviewers won’t share this view.

Article types

The instructions always include a list of the types of article that the journal publishes. Your paper must fit one of the article types and must follow the instructions for that type (especially regarding length limits).

What I call a research paper can be called by a variety of different names:

• Original article
• Original research
• Research report
• Primary research
• Article
• Letter

The word ‘Letter’ is used for a full (short) research paper in some journals (such as Nature journals) but for something much shorter in others, akin to the more colloquial meaning of the word letter.

Journals have a variety of criteria to distinguish between different article types. Sometimes the main difference is simply length, but often there is a difference in ‘significance’ or ‘completeness of the story’. These can be rather subjective judgements. Read a range of papers in the journal to get a feeling for the differences.

If your article isn’t a research paper, it is equally important to check whether the journal publishes articles like it. Usually journals invite review and comment articles, but some also accept unsolicited offers. Always send an email first describing your proposed review or comment, rather than just submitting it.

Policies

The policies section will vary a lot depending on the field. It will cover things like:

• requirements for making data, software and materials available
• ethics for animal experiments or human studies
• adherence to subject-specific guidelines such as MIAME or CONSORT
• adherence to authorship criteria, such as regarding ghostwriting and guest authorship (see the criteria laid out by the ICMJE)
• whether they will accept papers that have previously been published on a preprint server or presented at a conference
• policies on discussing the research with the media before publication.

It is crucial that your research follows all the guidelines for the journal. Violations can lead to immediate rejection.

Journals vary in how strict they are. However, if your study follows the highest possible ethical standards you are unlikely to find major differences between them. The exception to this is in journal policies on previous publication; newer journals are often less strict on this, and there is ongoing debate about the issue so instructions might change.

Format for submission

Some instructions aren’t to do with the manuscript contents itself but rather its file format and other things to do with how it is uploaded to the journal’s submission system. Publishers vary in what they require in terms of:

• File formats allowed (commonly allowed formats for text are doc, docx, odt and rtf; TeX files may or may not be accepted)
• Whether the text and figures should be in a single file or separate files
• Whether the figure legends should be under each figure or at the end of the text
• Whether a cover letter is required and what it should contain
• Whether page or line numbers should be included
• Whether the manuscript should be double spaced
• Whether suggestions or exclusions of reviewers are allowed or encouraged
• Whether submission has to be through the online system or whether post or email is allowed

Following these instructions is advisable, as online submissions systems can be inflexible. If you don’t follow the instructions there may be a delay before the manuscript is looked at by the editors or sent to review.

Length limits

All print journals and many online-only journals have length limits. It is best to keep to them at first submission, if only to avoid annoying the editors and reviewers and to avoid having to shorten your paper later if it is accepted. Some journals will reject any paper that is too long without considering it.

There are usually also length limits on the title and abstract, and sometimes on other sections too. Limits on the numbers of figures, tables and references are also common.

Formatting within the manuscript

Then there are the details of how the manuscript is laid out. In general these instructions are not quite as important at the submission stage as those listed above, as any problems can be fixed once the article is accepted. However, some journals are strict about this kind of thing being done properly on first submission. And it isn’t always clear from the instructions to authors how strict they are. See my previous post about formatting for initial submission for more.

The kind of thing that journals care about in this category are:

• Whether the abstract is subdivided into sections
• What sections are required in the main text (usually Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion or similar)
• What order the sections should be in (whether the Methods come before the Results or after the Discussion)
• Whether citations are allowed in the abstract
• Whether the reference citations should be numbered in order or given in the form “(Author et al., 2009)”

Non-varying instructions

Finally, there are the requirements that practically all journals have, although they can be worded in a variety of ways. These include:

• Use SI units
• Define all abbreviations and special symbols on first use
• Cite all figures, tables and references in the text
• Gene symbols should be italic; protein names should be Roman.

For more on what most journals tend to have in their instructions, see the generic set of instructions provided by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME).

There are companies and freelance editors, including me, who can help you to comply with instructions for authors for your target journal.

Submission to first decision time

Having written previously about journal acceptance to publication times, it is high time I looked at the other important time that affects publication speed: submission to first decision time. As I explained in the previous post, the time from submission to publication in a peer reviewed journal can be split into three phases, the two discussed previously and here and also the time needed for the authors to revise, which the journal can’t control.

A survey of submission to first decision times

I have trawled through the instructions to authors pages of the journals in the MRC frequently used journal list, which I have used in several previous posts as a handy list of relatively high-impact and well known biomedical journals. I’ve used the list as downloaded in 2012, and there may be new journals added to it now. I’ve omitted the review journals, which leaves 96.

From these pages I have tried to find any indication of the actual or intended speed to first decision for each journal. For many journals, no information was provided on the journal website about average or promised submission to first decision times. For example, no Nature Publishing Group, Lancet, Springer or Oxford University Press journals in this data set provide any information.

However, of these 96 journals 37 did provide usable information. I have put this information in a spreadsheet on my website.

20 promised a first decision within 28 or 30 days of submission. 12 others promised 20-25 days. Of the rest, two are particularly fast, Circulation Research (13 days in 2012) and Cellular Microbiology (14 days); and one is particularly slow, Molecular and Cellular Biology (4 to 6 weeks, though they may just be more cautious in their promises than other journals). JAMA and Genetics are also relatively slow, with 34 and 35 days, respectively. (Note that the links here are to the page that states the time, which is generally the information for authors.)

A few journals promise a particularly fast for selected (‘expedited’) papers but I have only considered the speed promised for all papers here.

I conclude from this analysis that, for relatively high-impact biomedical journals, a first decision within a month of submission is the norm. Anything faster than 3 weeks is fast, and anything slower than 5 weeks is slow.

Newer journals

But what about the newer journals? PeerJ has recently been boasting on its blog about authors who are happy with their fast decision times. The decision times given on this post are 17, 18 and 19 days. These are not necessarily typical of all PeerJ authors, though, and are likely to be biased towards the shorter times, as those whose decisions took longer won’t have tweeted about it and PeerJ won’t have included them in their post.

PLOS One gives no current information on its website about decision times. However, in a comment on a PLOS One blog post in 2009, the then Publisher Pete Binfield stated that “of the 1,520 papers which received a first decision in the second quarter of 2009 (April – June), the mean time from QC completion to first decision was 33.4 days, the median was 30 days and the SD was 18.” He didn’t say how long it took from submission to ‘QC completion’, which is presumably an initial check; I expect this would be only a few days.

Kent Anderson of the Scholarly Kitchen asked last year “Is PLOS ONE Slowing Down?“. This post only looked at the time between the submission and acceptance dates that are displayed on all published papers, and it included no data on decision dates, so the data tell us nothing about decision times. In a series of comments below the post David Solomon of Michigan State University gives more data, which shows that the submission to acceptance time went up only slightly between early 2010 and September 2011.

The star of journals in terms of decision time is undoubtedly Biology Open. It posts the average decision time in the previous month on its front page, and the figure currently given for February 2013 is 8 days. They say they aim to give a first decision within 10 days, and their tweets seem to bear this out: in June 2012 they tweeted that the average decision time in May 2012 had been 6 days, and similarly the time for April 2012 had been 9 days.

Other megajournals vary similarly to ordinary journals. Open Biology reports an average of 24 days, Cell Reports aims for 21 days, and G3 and Scientific Reports aim for 30 days. Springer Plus, the BMC series, the Frontiers journals, BMJ Open and FEBS Open Bio provided no information, though all boast of being fast.

What affects review speed?

If newer journals are faster, why might that be? One possible reason is that as the number of submitted papers goes up, the number of editors doesn’t always go up quickly enough, so the editors get overworked – whereas when a journal is new the number of papers to handle per editor may be lower.

It is important to remember that the speed of review is mainly down to the reviewers, as Andy Farke pointed out in a recent PLOS blog post. Editors can affect this by setting deadlines and chasing late reviewers, but they only have a limited amount of control over when reviewers send their reports.

But given this limitation, there could be reasons for variations in the average speed of review between journals. Reviewers might be excited by the prospect of reviewing for newer journals, so they are more likely to be fast. This could equally be true for the highest impact journals, of course, and also for open access journals if the reviewer is an open access fan. Enthusiastic reviewers not only mean that the reviewers who have agreed send their reports in more quickly, but also that it will be easier to get someone to agree to review in the first place. As Bob O’Hara pointed out in a comment on Andy Farke’s post, “If lots of people decline, you’re not going to have a short review time”.

A logical conclusion from this might be that the best way in which a journal could speed up its time to first decision would be to cultivate enthusiasm for their journal among the pool of potential reviewers. Building a community around the journal, using social media, conferences,  mascots or even free gifts might help. PeerJ seem to be aiming to build such a community with their membership scheme, not to mention their active Twitter presence and their monkey mascot. Biology Open‘s speed might be related to its sponsorship of meetings and its aim to “reduce reviewer fatigue in the community”.

Another less positive possible reason for shorter review times could be that reviewers are not being careful enough. This hypothesis was tested and refuted by the editors of Acta Neuropathologica in a 2008 editorial. (Incidentally, this journal had an average time from submission to first decision of around 17 days between 2005 and 2007, which is pretty fast.) The editorial says “Because in this journal all reviews are rated from 0 (worst) to 100 (best), we plotted speed versus quality. As reflected in Fig. 1, there is no indication that review time is related to the quality of a review.”

Your experience

I would love to find (or even do) some research into the actual submission to first decision times between different journals. Unfortunately that would mean getting the data from each publisher, and it might be difficult to persuade them to release it. (And I don’t have time to do this, alas.) Does anyone know of any research on this?

And have you experienced particularly fast or slow peer review at a particular journal? Are you a journal editor who can tell us about the actual submission to first decision times in your journal? Or do you have other theories for why some journals are quicker than others in this respect?

SpotOn London session: The journal is dead, long live the journal

I’m co-hosting a workshop at SpotOn London next week on the future of journals.

It’s time to end a long blogging hiatus to tell you about an exciting event coming up on Sunday 11 and Monday 12 November. SpotOn London (formerly called Science Online London) is a community event hosted by Nature Publishing Group for the discussion of how science is carried out and communicated online. There will be workshops on three broad topic areas – science communication and outreach, online tools and digital publishing, and science policy – and I am involved in one of the ‘online tools and digital publishing’ ones. This has the title ‘The journal is dead, long live the journal‘ and it will focus on current and future innovations in journal publishing. If you’re interested in how journals could or should change to better meet the needs of science, this is for you!

In this one-hour session we will have very short introductions from four representatives from different parts of the journal publishing world:

• Matias Piipari (@mz2), part of the team behind Papers software for finding an organising academic papers
• Damian Pattinson (@damianpattinson), Executive Editor of PLOS ONE
• Davina Quarterman, Web Publishing Manager at Wiley-Blackwell
• Ethan Perlstein (@eperlste) of Princeton University

We will then open the floor to contributions from participants, both in the room and online. We hope to cover three themes:

1. Megajournals; their impact on the journal and on how papers are going to be organised into journals. Will megajournals lead to a two tier marketplace of high end journals and a few megajournals, with mid-tier journals disappearing from the market altogether?
2. How do we find the papers of interest, in a world where journal brand doesn’t help? In a world where issues disappear, and researchers’ main point of contact with the literature is through aggregation points such as Google Scholar and Pubmed, what are the signifiers that we can build or support that will enable researchers to find the content that they need?
3. Once you get down to the paper, are there any innovations that we should be using now, at the individual paper level, and what are the barriers to us doing this?

Science Online events have a tradition of being more than just conferences – they aim to involve lots of people outside the room via the SpotOn website and Twitter as well as those in the room. So although the conference itself is sold out (though there is a waiting list for tickets), you can still follow along and get involved before, during and after the event itself. This session is at 4.30pm on Sunday 11 November, so look out on the Twitter hashtag #solo12journals around then. Beforehand, you can comment on co-host Ian Mulvany’s blog post introducing the session, look at the Google Doc that shows the thought processes the organisers went through in planning the session, check for tweets on the hashtag, and follow me (@sharmanedit), Ian (@ianmulvany) and co-host Bob O’Hara (@bobohara) and/or the speakers on Twitter for updates.

One the day, comments from Twitter will be moderated and introduced into the discussion in the room by Bob, who will be doing this remotely from Germany. The whole session (and all other SpotOn London session) will be live-streamed (probably here) and the video will be available afterwards; there will also be a Storify page collecting tweets using the #solo12journals hashtag.

This interaction with those outside the room is important because with only an hour there is a limit to the depth with which we will be able to cover the range of issues around journals. With online discussion as well we hope that more points can be discussed in more detail than would otherwise be possible. It might get a little confusing! I am new to this format, so I am slightly apprehensive but also excited about the possibilities.

Thoughts on megajournals

I am particularly interested in the aspect of the session on megajournals and how they are changing journal publishing. By megajournals we mean all the journals that have been set up to publish papers after peer review that assesses whether the research is sound but doesn’t attempt to second-guess the potential impact of the work. Some, like PLOS ONE, are truly mega – they published over 13,000 papers in 2011. Others, like the BMC series from BioMed Central, probably publish a similar number of papers but divided into many journals in different subject areas. Others have been set up to be sister journals to better known selective journals – for example, Scientific Reports from Nature Publishing Group and BioOpen from The Company of Biologists. All are open access and online only.

Some of these journals are now showing themselves not to be the dumping ground for boring, incremental research that they might have been expected. When PLOS ONE’s first impact factor was revealed to be over 4, there was surprise among many commentators. The question is now whether papers that are unlikely to be accepted by the top journals (roughly speaking, those with impact factors over about 10, though I know that impact factor is a flawed measure) will gradually be submitted not to specialist journals but to megajournals. The opportunity to get your paper seen by many people, which open access publishing provides, could often outweigh the benefits of publishing in a journal specific to your specialist community where your paper will be seen by only that community. I will be very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this issue raised by this session.

Get involved

So do comment using one of the channels mentioned above. Have you recently made a decision about where to send a paper that you knew wasn’t one for the top-flight journals, and did you decide on a specialist journal, a megajournal or some other route to publication? Regarding the other two themes of the session, how do you find papers in your field, and what do you want research papers to look like?

Crowdsourcing information about journals

Crowdsourced surveys of the experience of authors with journals are useful, but I have found only a few. For now, I propose a simpler survey of information gleaned from journal websites.

I was recently alerted by @melchivers (via @thesiswhisperer) to the existence of a blog by SUNY philosopher Andrew Cullison (@andycullison) that includes a set of journal surveys for the field. As Cullison explains in an overview post, the surveys consist of Google Docs spreadsheets, one for each journal, and a form interface that academics fill in with data on their experience of submitting to that journal. The information requested includes:

• the time taken for initial review
• the initial verdict of the journal (acceptance, rejection, revise and resubmit, conditional acceptance, withdrawn)
• the number of reviewers whose comments were provided
• an assessment of the quality of the reviewers’ comments
• the final verdict if the paper was revised
• the time from acceptance to publication
• an overall rating of the experience with the editors
• Some basic demographic data

This survey covers 180 journals in philosophy. The data is collated and various statistics are calculated, such as the average review time and acceptance to publication time and the average acceptance rate. Here are couple of examples: the British Journal of Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Science.

This kind of survey could be a valuable resource for authors in a particular field who are trying to choose a journal. They are crowdsourced, so they do not rely on only one or a few people to gather data. They also provide real data on how fast journals are in practice, which might differ from the statistics or promises provided on journal websites. However, they have limitations: as pointed out in comments below one of Cullison’s posts, they suffer from reporting bias. This is important given that for many of the journals surveyed there are fewer than ten responses.

I haven’t seen any surveys like this in any other field of academia, and certainly none in biology or medicine. I would be very interested to hear if others have seen any. In biology a similar survey would probably only be useful if divided up into smaller fields, such as plant cell biology or cardiovascular medicine. Or it could focus only on the general journals that cover large areas of science, biology or medicine.

A simpler journal survey

Alternatively, or as a first step towards full surveys of journals in biomedicine, a crowdsourced survey of the information presented on journal websites could be useful. This could include information such as the promised submission to first decision time and acceptance to publication time, licensing details (copyright, Creative Commons and so on), charges, article types and length limits. This would involve only one small dataset per journal, which could fit on a single line of a spreadsheet rather than data for individual papers, so would be more manageable than Cullison’s surveys.

I have made a start on such a survey, and you can find it on Google Docs here. I have used the same set of 98 journals, derived from the UK Medical Research Council  list of journals popular with MRC authors, that I used for my open access charges spreadsheet. For every journal, the spreadsheet now contains the name of the publisher, the main journal URL, the URL for the instructions for authors, whether the entire journal is open access or not, and whether there is an open access option. There are also columns for the following information: what the website says about acceptance to publication time; whether the accepted, non-edited manuscript is published online, and what the website says about submission to first decision time. I have filled in some of these fields but haven’t yet checked all the websites for all this information.

The spreadsheet is editable by anyone. I realise that this risks someone messing up the data or adding spam text. For the columns that I don’t want you to change, I have included a partial safeguard: these columns are pulled in from a hidden, locked sheet of the spreadsheet. Please try not to delete data in any cells – just add data in empty cells. If you have any other suggestions for how to allow information to be added but not deleted, or otherwise to avoid problems, please add a comment below.

Now it’s your turn

Would you like to contribute information to this survey? If so, please go ahead and edit the spreadsheet.

If you could publicise it that would be great too.

And do you have any comments on this process, suggestions for improvement and so on?

Other questions

Have you used Cullison’s surveys and found them useful (or less useful)? Have you come across any surveys like the philosophy one for other fields? Or like my survey?

Acceptance to publication time

Journals vary a lot in how long they take to publish accepted papers.

Publication speed is one factor that many authors take into account when choosing a journal. The time from submission to publication in a peer reviewed journal can be split into three phases:

1. The time from submission from the first decision
2. The time needed for the authors to revise
3. The time from acceptance to publication

The second of these cannot generally be controlled by the journal, because different papers need different amounts of time to revise and the personal circumstances of the authors can affect the time needed. So only the first and third phases should be used to judge the journal. I will cover submission to first decision time in a future post and will focus on post-acceptance speed here. By ‘publication’ I mean the first time the paper is made publicly available, whether online or in print.

What happens after a paper is accepted?

Most journals have variations on a standard procedure: copyediting, typesetting, sending proofs to the authors, checking the proofs, and conversion to various formats (such as XML, HTML and pdf). For print journals, there are extra steps of compiling the pdf files into an issue and preparing them for printing – these steps don’t usually affect the time to online publication, but see below for exceptions to this.

Copyediting involves a professional editor (sometimes employed by the journal, but very often a freelancer like me), who reads the paper carefully and ensures that it is accurate, clear, readable, in correct English and in the journal’s house style. Typesetting involves laying out the paper in the journal’s format for print or pdf, with the correct fonts and symbols and with the figures at their final sizes. Some journals use the figures as the authors provide them, others edit or even redraw, and most at least check that the figures fit with the accompanying text.

After typesetting (or sometimes before), the author is sent the proof to check, along with any queries from the copyeditor. Some journals use professional proofreaders to check the proofs after typesetting and after the author has sent their corrections, but nowadays this step is skipped by many journals. But someone still needs to incorporate the author’s corrections into the article and do final checks before publication.

In my experience copyediting, typesetting and proof checking a typical research paper usually takes a few weeks. So, if the process starts immediately after acceptance and isn’t delayed, and if there is no delay from a paper gaining its final form and being published, a corrected paper can be published online a few weeks after acceptance. However, delays can occur at any stage.

Some journals display a typical or promised time from acceptance to publication on their websites. I have trawled through lots, and below is a selection. If you find more, please do add them in a comment. Note that these times are neither maximum nor minimum times – they are probably what the editors feel is a typical time, allowing for some papers to be published more quickly and some more slowly.

• Average of 10 days: Stem Cells (Wiley)
• About 3 weeks: BMJ Group journals such as Journal of Medical Genetics
• Within 4 weeks: Biology Open (Company of Biologists)
• Within 6 weeks: PLoS Biology (Public Library of Science), Journal of Cell Biology (Rockefeller University Press)
• Within 6-8 weeks: PLoS Medicine (Public Library of Science)
• Around 8 weeks: FASEB Journal, Systematic Biology (Oxford University Press), American Journal of Human Genetics (Cell Press)
• Within 2 months: Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences (Springer)
• 77 days: Circulation (American Heart Association)
• Up to 12 weeks: Cell (Cell Press)

You can see from this list that journals from the same publisher vary in their promised times and even in whether they promise a time or not.

Factors that affect publication speed

There are many things that can affect how quickly papers are published once they are accepted.

Publication in issues

Scheduling of issues is one of the commonest reasons for delays. Although most journals now publish articles online before print, there are still some that hold accepted papers in a queue until there is space for them in an issue. Elsevier changed to article-based publication in 2010, and their press release at the time claimed that this could shorten acceptance to publication time by up to seven weeks, to only a few weeks.

Some journals have backlogs of accepted papers that lead to delays in publication of months or even years. Others have got rid of these backlogs by changing to publishing online as soon as possible after acceptance and only later assembling papers into issues (I have been involved in helping one publisher with this transition).

Journals that publish only in issues can also delay particular papers for other reasons than space: if they aim for a balance of article types in each issue they may hold a paper over if there are too many of that type in the current issue; or if they want to publicise several papers on the same topic together, they may hold some of them until all are ready.

It is difficult to work out from journal websites whether they publish in issues or not. The best way to check for any particular journal is probably to look at the acceptance dates for articles in a particular issue and see whether they are spread out (in which case publication probably happens by article) or whether they are all a similar time before the issue date (in which case publication is probably by issue).

Copyediting first or later

The most common system is to copyedit, typeset, send proofs to the authors and perhaps proofread before online publication. Some journals, however, now publish the accepted version almost immediately after acceptance, and do any copyediting and typesetting later, replacing the accepted version when the edited and typeset version is ready. The latter journals can therefore boast acceptance to publication times of a few days or even hours rather than weeks.

I have been able to establish that the following publishers post accepted articles online before editing or typesetting for some or all journals:

• Wiley (‘OnlineAccepted’ option offered by some journals)
• Elsevier (Gastroenterology, publication within 5-7 business days)
• American Chemical Society (all journals, ‘usually within 30 minutes to 24 hours of acceptance’)
• Genetics Society of America (Genetics)
• BioMed Central (all journals, ‘publication occurs at the moment of acceptance’)

Fast track articles

Some journals have a fast track that offers faster publication for selected articles. This can speed up publication of these articles, but it can result in slower publication for all the non-fast-track articles if staff time is taken up with the fast-track ones. The editors make the decision on which papers are fast-tracked, but authors can usually request it and their request may be honoured if their reasons are judged to be good enough.

The following publishers offer fast-track publication for some or all journals:

• Oxford University Press (eg European Heart Journal; publication within 10 days)
• Elsevier (eg Journal of the American College of Cardiology, publication of ‘Expedited Publications’ within 10 days)
• Annals of Internal Medicine (publication within 3 weeks)

Acceptance date issues

When looking at journal acceptance to publication times, it is worth bearing in mind that the acceptance date is the date when the final formal letter of acceptance is sent to the author. In reality, the decision to publish in principle is often made earlier, and the authors receive an email saying that the paper will be accepted as long as they make some final minor changes. Authors often feel at this point that the paper has been accepted, and it is usually safe to celebrate at this point. But it is not a final acceptance, and acceptance to publication times are measured only from the formal acceptance date.

How to estimate how fast a journal will publish after acceptance

I suggest following these steps to work out how fast your target journal is likely to publish your accepted paper.

1. Check if it publishes accepted versions before any editing or typesetting. If so, publication time is likely to be 0–3 days.

2. Check if it publishes papers online as soon as possible after acceptance, rather than waiting for an issue (print or online). Check whether this happens to all papers or just when the author requests, and request it if needed. If your paper is in this system, publication time is likely to be about 3–8 weeks.

3. Check what the journal’s website says about the acceptance to publication times they aim for, and multiply by about 1.5 to get a maximum probable time. If this time has elapsed after acceptance, you can justifiably email the editors requesting an update.

4. Look at some recent papers: most journals give the dates of acceptance and online publication on the paper, and often on the page containing the online abstract, so you can get a feel for how much time elapses between these events.

5. If it publishes only in print, be prepared for a long wait!

Your experience

Researchers, how important is publication speed after acceptance to you? Do you know some particularly fast journals or publishers, or can you recommend avoiding others that are very slow? Or can you point us to journal websites that promise a certain time to publication?

Journal editors, could you tell us how quickly your journal publishes papers after acceptance? Have you considered publishing your target times on the journal website, and why did you decide to do this or not?

Why do journals insist that data ‘are’?

Given the controversy over this grammatical point, I argue that journal style guides should allow both ‘data is’ and ‘data are’.

I was recently directed (via @blefurgy and @deb_lavoy on Twitter) to an old blog post on something that frequently bugs me: the question of whether the word ‘data’ is singular or plural. The post, by Norman Gray, an astronomical data management researcher at Glasgow University, UK, dates from 2005 but I haven’t seen a better one on the topic. Gray argues that:

…the word ‘data’, in english, is a singular mass noun. It is thus a grammatical and stylistic error to use it as a plural.

Plural use is barbaric: amongst other crimes, it is a deliberate archaism, and thus a symptom of bad writing.

Strong stuff.

An alternative view is given by Peter Coles (@telescoper), another astronomer at Cardiff University, UK, who also explains the issue clearly:

For those of you who aren’t up with such things, English nouns can be of two forms: “count” and “non-count” (or “mass”). Count nouns are those that can be enumerated and therefore have both plural and singular forms: one eye, two eyes, etc. Non-count nouns (which is a better term than “mass nouns”) are those which describe something which is not enumerable, such as “furniture” or “cutlery”. Such things can’t be counted and they don’t have a different singular and plural forms. You can have two chairs (count noun) but can’t have two furnitures (non-count noun)…

…Norman Gray asserts that (a) “data” is a non-count noun and that (b) it should therefore be singular.

I tend to look and listen out for instances of ‘data’, and I have very rarely heard someone say ‘the data are’ in natural speech. As Gray says:

The majority of writers who would dutifully pluralise ‘data’ in writing naturally and consistently use it as a mass noun in conversation: they ask how much data an instrument produces, not how many; they talk of how data is archived, not how they are archived; they talk of less data rather than fewer; and they always talk of data with units, saying they have a megabyte of data, or 10 CDs, or three nights, and never saying ‘I have 1000 data’ and expecting to be understood.

You may wonder why this matters at all. Well, practically every scientific paper contains the word ‘data’ somewhere, and all the journals I edit for insist that it is made plural every time. I spend a ridiculous amount of my editing time looking out for instances of ‘the data is’ and similar. And they can’t be found automatically using a macro, either, because the subject and verb can be separated by other words, or the verb may be something else like ‘shows’ or ‘illustrates’ rather than ‘is’. This is ‘mistake’ that a lot of authors make.

So is ‘data is’ really a mistake? Are the journals right to insist on this change?

The argument from etymology

The main argument used for ‘data are’ is that the word is derived from a plural Latin word. Gray dismantles this thoroughly by showing that it never was a simple plural in Latin. It is:

…the neuter plural past participle of the first conjugation verb dare, ‘to give’ (it’s actually also the feminine singular past participle, but that really, really, doesn’t matter).

…there was almost certainly no latin word for the concept that we now identify by the english word ‘data’….

…Put another way, that means that the word ‘data’, as a technical term referring to the ore of observations, which can be painstakingly reduced to extract knowledge, is not a latin word at all. It’s a native english word with a latin past, which means, bluntly, that we get to choose how to use it, and if its meaning changes over time – as it has – then its grammatical analysis can reasonably and properly migrate also.

I find this a convincing argument. It reminds me of the pedants who don’t like split infinitives (‘to boldly go’) because Latin infinitive verbs couldn’t be split, which is pretty irrelevant to how we should treat them in English (see Wikipedia for current views on this issue).

Gray goes on to compare ‘data’ with other similar Latin-derived words, such as ‘agenda’, ‘stamina’, ‘media’ and ‘phenomena’. ‘Stamina’ is at one end of a spectrum: it is never used in the singular (‘stamen’) except in a specialist botanical sense, and it is a singular noun. ‘Phenomena’ is at the other end – the singular ‘phenomenon’ is frequently used and ‘phenomena’ is a plural noun. ‘Agenda’ is almost the same as ‘stamina’ but the singular ‘agendum’ just about makes sense (although ‘agenda item’ would be more usual). ‘Media’ is moving from being a plural of ‘medium’ to being a separate singular noun in its own right. Gray says:

In this spectrum (not ‘spectra’, of course), ‘data’ is clearly located near ‘agenda’.

I would agree with this assessment on the whole, though I disagree with Gray that ‘datum’ is ‘certainly not one of the things that makes up data’. But like ‘agenda item’, a more commonly used term would be ‘data point’.

In fact, there is a technical use of the word ‘datum’, which Gray has dug out: it is a surveying term. But the plural of this usage of ‘datum’ is ‘datums’, not ‘data’.

Peter Coles doesn’t in fact completely agree with the journal publishers’ stipulation that ‘data’ is never singular – rather, he argues that there are contexts in which the plural use makes sense, and others in which singular use is better:

“If I had less data my disk would have more free space on it.” (Non-count)

“If I had fewer data I would not be able to obtain an astrometric solution.” (Count).

I’m fine with this distinction if people want to use it. But why, then, should journals insist that the singular use is incorrect?

A proposal: stop being prescriptive about data

You may or may not agree with Norman Gray (and me) that ‘data are’ is incorrect. But you can surely agree that there is controversy about the issue. The reasons to insist on plural data are hotly contested, to say the least.

So I propose that publishers remove the stipulation in their style guides that ‘data is’ is incorrect and should be changed to ‘data are’. In fact there is no need to be prescriptive on the issue at all: if the author writes ‘data are’, it can stay, but if they write ‘data is’, that can stay too. This would save a not insignificant amount of time for copyeditors, in searching and replacing ‘data is’ and in arguing the point with authors. It would probably save authors some time and annoyance too. And it would also make journals look more modern in this age of terabytes of data.

Who is going to be the first publisher to take a leap into the unknown? You have nothing to lose but your fuddy-duddy reputation.

Your opinions

Grammatical issues like this usually generate more heat than light, so I expect there will be comments on this post. I would particularly like to hear from journal editors who have been involved in discussions about this issue for their style guides, and from authors who have railed against the ‘data are’ rule imposed by a journal. I reserve the right to remove comments that simply rehash old arguments or only say that one or other construction is ‘ugly’ or ‘just wrong’.

Tips on scientific writing from European Science Editors

The European Association of Science Editors guidelines for scientific writing are a great resource.

I have recently joined the European Association of Science Editors (EASE). They have a valuable document on their website: EASE Guidelines for Authors and Translators of Scientific Articles to be Published in English (pdf; published June 2011). These guidelines are full of useful tips for those who write or edit scientific articles in English or translate them into English. They will be especially useful for non-native speakers of English.

Some highlights:

• A description of what is needed in each of the main sections of a research paper
• Various things to watch out for where English differs from other languages; for example, full stops should be used for decimal points (not commas), and Roman numerals should not be used for months
• A recommendation to avoid phrasal verbs, such as ‘find out’ or ‘pay off’, where possible, as they are often difficult for non-native speakers to understand
• An appendix on how to write an abstract
• An appendix on ‘empty’ words and sentences that should be avoided, both for conciseness but also to avoid ambiguity (such as ‘good’ or ‘big’ when a more specific term could be used)
• An appendix on how to use linking words and phrases to give cohesion to an article
• Examples of expressions that can be simplified or deleted (for example, ‘conducted inoculation experiments on’ can be changed to ‘inoculated’)
• Examples of differences between British and American spelling.

I was particularly intrigued by a note in the guidelines (page 4) that parallel constructions are allowed in English, though not in some other languages. An example of a parallel construction is ‘It was high in A, medium in B, and low in C’. Native speakers of some other languages might (incorrectly) want to change to something like ‘It was high in A, medium for B, and low in the case of C’.

I hadn’t realised that avoiding parallel constructions was recommended in any other languages. I’d be curious to know which languages these are, and how strict this rule is. If it is Japanese or Chinese, this might explain why I frequently see ‘respectively’ being overused by native speakers of these languages, as it would be one way to avoid a parallel construction (‘it was high, medium, and low in A, B, and C, respectively’). If you are tempted to use ‘respectively’ in this way, consider changing it to the parallel construction, which is more standard English usage.

The guidelines have been translated into many languages by volunteers, including into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic and most Western European and Eastern European languages. They are free for all to read, and non-commercial printing is allowed.

Do go and read them!