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Editor's Notes |
jules-rothstein@attbi.com
Last month I used the Editor's Note to debunk myths about the Journal and its peer-review process. My Editorial Board has reminded me about a few more rumors that need "busting."
"When your paper is rejected, it's all over."
Every author who submits to our Journal receives a "disposition" (decision) letter written by the Editor. The Editor explains the decision—which usually is based on a summary of the reviewers' comments and the comments of the Editorial Board member (EBM) or the Associate Editorial Board Member (AEBM)—and sometimes elaborates on these comments. Most important, the letter contains comments on whether the paper can be resubmitted.
We want to see papers with potential resubmitted after authors make the revisions suggested by the reviewer team. We ask authors who need any clarification to contact the EBM, the AEBM, or the Editor, and we supply phone numbers and e-mail addresses in every disposition letter. Nothing saddens me or the review team more than to see a manuscript that could be resubmitted lost to our readers.
Rejection feels lousy, and there is no getting around it. As I often write in disposition letters:
As an author who has had my own papers rejected, I know that this decision is disappointing to you. Remember that all manuscripts submitted to the Journal are reviewed by content experts. The comments offered by the reviewer team are intended to guide you. The goal of this process is to ensure that credible information is presented as clearly as possible for the reader, and, in many ways, it assists authors in clearly and accurately communicating their ideas and data.
When we say that we believe a manuscript can be successfully revised and resubmitted, we mean it! Resubmitted manuscripts often proceed swiftly through the review process the second time because the authors benefited from the review of the initial paper. If you are an author who has worked hard on your initial submission and feel discouraged by a rejection, please don't let all of your efforts go to waste.
"Only experienced authors get published in the Journal. Newcomers should send their articles to less rigorous Journals."
For most types of articles (Research Reports, Case Reports, Technical Reports), we "mask" the identities of the authors from our EBMs, AEBMs, and manuscript reviewers by removing authors' names from papers. To completely blind reviewers, however, is often impossible. For instance, the pattern of referencing may make it obvious who the authors are. Ultimately, a good article is a good article, regardless of who wrote it.
Authors who want to forgo the benefit of a peer-review process, which will help improve their paper, can submit to a journal with lower standards. If they believe, however, that they have done good work and want to engage in this process, they would do themselves and their work a disservice by taking the easy way out. They also may be settling for a smaller audience.
Authors can always submit to another journal if they believe that Physical Therapy should not have rejected their paper. Sending the paper to us first means the author would lose about 3 months—which is the time we take to get about 75% of papers back to authors—but it also means authors would not get free advice from experts who normally get paid to do this kind of critique. Authors who are new to publishing also should be comforted by the fact that most journals with integrity routinely reject papers by well-known authors. The only way that experience helps some authors get published in our Journal is if their experience makes their papers better.
"The Journal's copyediting is too picky."
To avoid overloading the review process and overburdening authors during the revision process, we cannot and do not describe every single item that needs to be addressed. After a paper is accepted and scheduled for publication, a vital series of steps takes place before the paper is sent to the printer. First, the Editor or an EBM edits the paper and identifies any issues that may have arisen from the revision. Then, the paper is copyedited by a professional copyeditor who is trained in scientific editing, usually our Associate Editor. All of these edits and requests are collated, and one document is sent to the author.
Nothing irritates some authors more than having to make changes at this stage of the process, even though we tell them about our expectations in the acceptance notification. Their frustration is understandable. We all like to be finished with things—even the Editors! But there are good reasons for our process. Articles need to be understood, or else why publish? If they are laden with jargon, that becomes next to impossible. Jargon is a big problem for our Journal because we publish articles that are written from the perspectives of different physical therapy specialties or that use conceptual frameworks from different disciplines. For instance, terms that might be used routinely in the motor control literature can stop all but the most persistent readers. Similarly, what is accepted in the social sciences often will not be clear to readers who have been away from those disciplines for some time. Some consistency between articles, which can be achieved only by the type of process I've described, is also desirable.
Papers do not have to be "dumbed down" to be comprehensible. We want to work with authors to make papers reader friendly. The Journal is obligated—not just to the readers, but also to the authors—to make articles more readable. An article that is not widely understood or that promulgates unclear ideas might as well not exist. Based on readership surveys, readers appreciate that our articles, for the most part, are highly readable.
None of the changes we make to articles are irrevocable. Authors who do not like our edits are invited to discuss them with us. Even though we don't usually return to the original language that was perceived by the editorial team to be problematic, we almost always find mutually agreeable solutions. Few things give me greater pleasure than working with authors to find solutions that make them happy and that do not compromise the Journal or the value of its articles.
Our policies require explicit operational definitions and justification—with data on reliability and validity, for example—for the selection of tests used in Research Reports and Case Reports. The meaningful work physical therapists do should be described clearly, and we need to support our decision making in a clear and scientifically justifiable manner. It is not sufficient for authors to know what was done and why; readers need to know this too, and they should not have to work too hard to find this information.
Recently a paper appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), a usually outstanding journal, with the title "Effectiveness of Dynamic Muscle Training, Relaxation Training, or Ordinary Activity for Chronic Neck Pain: Randomised Controlled Trial."1 Even after reading the article, I am not sure what made the use of dumbbells for the upper extremities "dynamic." I also have no idea what comprised the relaxation training. As for defining "ordinary activity," your guess is as good as mine. When I have neck pain, depending on its severity, my activity is anything but ordinary or consistent.
Our profession has suffered for decades from overly simplistic assumptions about what we do with patients—for example, that we use exercises with little regard for the dose or an overall plan of patient management. We rightfully contend that our level of education and clinical training allows us to examine patients and manage their care and that this may or may not include exercises or activities. Whoever oversaw the BMJ article, in my opinion, had no sensitivity for or understanding of the services provided by physical therapists. Imagine a paper that focuses on treatment of an infection but has no information on dosage, or a paper about surgery that does not mention the procedure used. The vague descriptions about what physical therapists do that we often see in the literature are either willfully disrespectful of what we do or simply a product of ignorance. But if we ourselves cannot be more explicit in our own Journal, who will be? If we cannot provide examples of how our interventions should be described, how can we expect any better from others? Physical therapist practice is too important for us to allow it to be sloppily described or characterized by undefinable jargon.
A single unhappy author is one too many, but a single unclear concept or poorly described intervention is also one too many. Through editing we pay proper respect to our profession. I contend that it is the price we must pay in order to show the world what we do and why we do it.
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