Journals: Increase Revisions, Not Rejections

摘要

In Their Report "Flows Of Research manuscripts among scientific journals reveal hidden submission patterns" (this issue, p. 1065; published online 11 October), V. Calcagno et al. discuss an enlightening and unexpected finding about the path that manuscripts often follow in the publication process. Among other insights, they show that previously rejected manuscripts that are submitted to other journals ultimately receive more citations, once published, than papers in the same journal that were not previously rejected. In light of this result, a feature on this Report in Nature (1) quotes physicist Michael Schreiber from the Technical University of Chemnitz in Germany, who suggests that journal editors should reject more manuscripts because that improves their citation count. I argue that editors should do the opposite to improve their own journal's citation impact.