Not Sent Out For Review

Blogger Pete over at Fragment-Based Drug Discovery has a tale to tell about trying to get a paper published. He sent in a manuscript on alkane/water partition coefficients to the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, only to get back the "not sent out for review" response. That's the worst, the "We're not even going to consider this one" letter. And the odd thing is that, as he rightly put it, this does sound like a JCIM sort of paper, but the editor's response was that it was inappropriate for the journal, and that they had "limited interest" in QSAR/QSPR studies. So off the paper went to the Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design. But as it was going to press, what should appear in JCIM but a paper on. . .alkane/water partition coefficients. There follows some speculation on how and why this happened, and if further details show up, I'll report on them. But the whole "not sent out for review" category is worth thinking about. I'd guess that most papers that fall into that category truly deserve to be there - junk, junk that's written impossibly and impenetrably poorly, things that should have been sent to a completely different journal. These are the scientific equivalent of Theresa Neilsen Hayden's famous Slushkiller post, about the things that show up unsolicited at a publisher's office. If you're editing a science fiction magazine, you might be surprised to get lyric poetry submissions in another language, or biographical memoirs about growing up in Nebrask...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs