Half-baked?

In their comments to yesterday's post, Thomas Presskorn and Andrew Gelman have raised the worry that by encouraging people to submit their work regularly to journals I'm going to increase the amount of "half-baked" work that their editors and reviewers have to deal with. Thomas's version of this worry (as expressed at this blog) includes the idea that authors might try to use review reports in the development of the article. That is, the author knows that the article is not finished, but submits it for review in order to gather input about how to proceed.

I should start by saying that I have not encouraged people to submit their work before it is finished. I have encouraged them to finish their work more regularly in order to be able to submit it. So if my advice is followed in the right spirit it should only increase the amount of finished work that is submitted to journals. That is, it will give journals more material to choose from, but not simply more material that has to be filtered out.

That said, I don't think journals should complain about people submitting work to them. And I don't think they do; I don't hear this complaint from journal editors, but from other scholars and, sometimes, reviewers. Reviewers, however, should complain about the desk-rejection mechanism of the journal if they are asked to review a paper that is clearly half-baked. They should not complain about the author's judgment, but the editor's. The whole point of the review process is that we can't rely on the author's judgment.

There are some simple things you can look for in the first 600 and last 400 words of a paper in order to see whether a paper should be sent back to the author on purely formal grounds (I'll write a post about them tomorrow). A good set of guidelines for authors about the structure of the manuscript can also make it easy to see whether a paper is unfinished. However it chooses to do it, it is very much the responsibility of journal to figure something out. Journals want high rejection rates for good and bad reasons. Some want you to submit your work to give them an opportunity to publish it, some to have an opportunity to reject it. But if they want those high rejection rates then they have find an efficient way of processing submissions. Putting moral restraint on authors is not the right way to do this. (The problem of self-plagiarism, which Andrew raises, like the problem of plagiarism generally, is an ethical issue, of course. But not one that arises out of concern for the work load of editors and reviewers.)

In any case, what's driving increased submissions is the increased pressure to publish. My advice, to focus your own efforts (and the planning of your department) on submitting work, rather than obsessing about publishing it, is just a way of making something explicit that will happen implicitly anyway. In order to publish more you have to submit more. And when you submit more you will get rejected more. And that means you'll give journals a bit more work to do. But it really is their job.