From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2012 08:23:32 +0400

James O'Donnell wrote:

"Something I would like to know - but now cannot find out, when I read
an article - is whether and how often and by whom the same piece has
been rejected.  Many editors would be glad to have that information
about individual items and "average prior rejections/article" would be
an interesting metric of the quality of a journal."

This might be useful, but having those numbers only can be misleading.
 And. I'm afraid, the last thing it would show is anything to do with
the quality of the journal, unless there is full disclosure on the
reasons for the rejection.  There are several reasons for rejecting an
article, and poor quality is only one of them.  Of course, journals
that trade on their rejection rates don't easily advertise that nugget
of information, and rely on this mis-conception.

In fact, I suspect that some journals engineer high rejection rates;
or, at least, know that circumstances other than quality are leading
to the high rejection rates, and do nothing about it.

Here is an example: A year ago, I submitted an article on medical
education to a medical journal. On the journal's website, medical
education was ranked as a "very high" acceptance priority.  It was
rejected by the editor before it even got to the reviewers.  The chief
reason given was that "it deals with medical education."

When I queried this with the editor, she said that, two months before,
they had had a change in editorial policy, and that the online
documentation simply had not been updated.  Fair enough.  I guess.

That was in November 2011.  Guess what?  Seven months later, and their
documentation _still_ hasn't been updated.  I wonder just how many
papers they have rejected because of this false documentation, and how
that has boosted their rejection rates.

Now this might be specifically designed to engineer a high rejection
rate, or it might just be very, very sloppy work by a Medline-indexed
journal; either way, a record showing that this paper has previously
been rejected should also carry the note that the journal is at fault.
 And, if the author and reviewers are to be identified, then the
rejecting journals must also be.


Regards

Ken

Dr. Ken Masters
Asst. Professor: Medical Informatics
Medical Education Unit
College of Medicine & Health Sciences
Sultan Qaboos University
Sultanate of Oman
E-i-C: The Internet Journal of Medical Education