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