I am interested in the policies of journals about declining to review submitted articles. As an author, I had never submitted a paper that was not peer reviewed before eventual editorial action. As a new editor, I find that 20%-30% of the submitted pieces are read by an editor and a judgment is made that they will not be publishable by the journal for one reason or another (usually scientific quality, although sometimes topic area or age range of participants). A review is written by the editor and a letter sent saying the article submission has been declined.

The justification for this is that additional review is a waste of a precious resource (reviewer time) and that authors are given feedback through editor review. I also know as a reviewer how annoyed I sometimes am to be asked to review work that should so obviously never be submitted. I was wondering about the policies of other journals in this regard.

Nancy Darling

___________________________

Nancy, this is a very interesting question. If the topic is outside the scope of the journal clearly the journal editors are not in a position to give an adequate review and therefore it is to the author's advantage to be told this as quickly as possible to enable them to submit elsewhere. What about the situation though when the editors review inhouse and reject for any of the other reasons you mentioned without sending out for full review. Is this really useful peer review at all? Many journals with larger staffs do this, e.g. BMJ promise to reject many papers within 2 weeks on this basis. The Annals of Emergency Medicine surveyed their authors and found that authors were more satisfied when they received a full review.

Elise Langdon-Neuner
Managing Editor, Journal of Men's Health and Gender

___________________________

I used that practice as well to avoid sending clearly poorly written or conceived articles out to reviewers—I believe that is one of the duties of a good editor in chief or those that immediately report to that position whose responsibility is to screen articles—some journals have a small group which discusses all submissions before sounding out for review and returning those not deemed of suitable quality or topic back to the author.

Michael

___________________________
In my experience screening rather than reviewing all papers is common practice in major journals that employ several in-house editors, but much rarer among journals edited by part-time editors or those in which the editorial board does most of the reviewing. But I'd be happy to be corrected by editors. You might also be interested to note the BMJ's policy of screening papers based only on their abstracts—see Groves T and Abbasi K. Screening research papers by reading abstracts. BMJ. 2004;329:470-471 for details. Liz Wager
Princes Risborough, UK

___________________________

An associate editor and 1 to 2 senior editors screen manuscripts at Ann Intern Med. About half are rejected without review because the screeners consider the material one of the following: too preliminary or of very low quality, topic matter not likely to interest the target readership, or the findings are already well-known (nothing new).

Cindy Mulrow

___________________________

Having a part-time editor is not a good enough excuse for sending out patently unsuitable papers to reviewers—their time is worth something too! (I no longer review for a journal whose editor cheerfully told me that all submissions are sent to reviewers without someone even reading the abstracts.)

Useful criteria for 'reject without review' that can be applied by the manager or adminstrative person for quick confirmation by a part-time/honorary editor are:

1. Outside scope of journal.
2. Written by beginner or non-English-speaker with no idea of how to structure a journal paper.
3. Previously published elsewhere.

It is kind, especially if your journal has some sense of responsibility for author education (e.g., sponsored by a professional association) to provide authors in category 2 with a standard letter, information pack or set of links to useful sites/books (such as Robert A Day's How to Write & Publish a Scientific Paper).

Papers can be returned to authors by admin staff for revision and resubmission before review if they are far too long or inappropriately formatted. Papers that are slices of salami or whose previous publication is artfully concealed can be much harder for non-specialist adminstrative staff to pick up; unfortunately they may go out to review if the editor does not have time to screen them. The journal's instructions to reviewers should encourage reviewers to return such papers with very short reports.

Juliet Richters
Senior Research Fellow, National Centre in HIV Social Research

___________________________