Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

Volume 6, 2009 http://asa.aip.org

157th MeetingAcoustical Society of America

Portland, Oregon 18 - 22 May 2009

Session 4aID: Interdisciplinary

4aID2. Realities of publishing in a journal: why should you submit, what should you submit,and what problems might you encounterAllan D. Pierce*

*Corresponding author’s address: Mechanical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, adp@bu.edu

Attractions of a journal are its widespread availability, its archival (forever!) nature, priority in literature searches, and its prestige. Articles should be readable to others in the field, be significant, and be original. JASA is selective and imposes standards. Perceived quality is often measured by the "Impact Factor", which may have very little to do with the extent towhich the Journal fulfills the mission of the Society. Of great frustration to the editors is that a substantial fraction ofauthors who submit papers seem to be somewhat clueless as to what is a reasonable topic and what is a reasonable scopefor an article in JASA. Also frustrating is that most good work reported at Society meetings never gets submitted. Thepresent talk critically discusses the selection process, its peer-review aspects, and its flaws. The selection process dealswith realities, such as that willing and competent reviewers are hard to find and that submitted reviews are often inane,with carefully selected highly expert Associate Editors who can make authoritative decisions without absolute reliance on external reviews. Suggestions are given on how to prepare a suitable manuscript and on how to cope with the vagaries ofthe peer review process.

Published by the Acoustical Society of America through the American Institute of Physics

Allan Pierce

© 2009 Acoustical Society of America [DOI: 10.1121/1.3192845]Received 24 Jun 2009; published 13 Jul 2009Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Vol. 6, 032004 (2009) Page 1

The paper that appears below contains the slides that were shown at the Publishing Workshopsession in Portland, along with a few explanatory remarks and extensions. The author is the Editor-in-Chief of the Acoustical Society, the chief publication of which is the Journal of the AcousticalSociety of America, the first issue of which appeared in October 1929,

Writing a paper for submission to a peer-reviewed journal usually requires considerable work,so one might perhaps ask “Why bother.”

Allan Pierce

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You of course have to have something to write about, and you have to anticipate that whatyou eventually write will be of interest to someone.

The present writer’s best guess is that the chief obstacle is procrastination. The quotationbelow is the last sentences in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. She wrote her rather longbest-selling book by meticulously getting up every morning at 5 am until she finished it. Theremay have been a little bit of Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell, but not too much.

Allan Pierce

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Writing papers merely to get tenure or to impress one’s upper administration is not generallysomething which good journals desire that prospective authors should do. There are lots of counter-pressures on college faculty, and a casual recollection of various academic colleagues around thecountry places the nominally successful ones, who are perhaps applauded by various influentialfactions, but who do very little publishing in journals, as including the following.

Needless to say, one should publish papers in journals for di!erent reasons other than just tosuperficially survive in the academic world. One of the present writer’s favorite books is KingsleyAmis’s Lucky Jim (1954), which describes the tribulations of a young and not especially publishing-oriented lecturer (ca. 1950) at a small “provincial university.”

Allan Pierce

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The idea that universities should require faculty to publish was ridiculed persuasively inCaplow and McGee’s The Academic Marketplace (1958, reprinted 2001), widely touted as a straight-forward, hard-hitting expose of the American university.

Given that your reasons for doing so are “pure” and that you do intend to submit a paper toa journal, it is advised that you decide upon just which journal at a very early stage, perhaps evenbefore starting the actual writing.

Allan Pierce

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There are some “game-players” in the academic world (of the sort which Caplow and McGeemight deplore) who argue passionately that one should always try to publish in journals with thehighest impact factor. Here is a brief explanation of what this factor is

The impact factor is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the reasons for its existence and useare summarized below.

Allan Pierce

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The existence of the impact factor makes it possible that some superficial bodies which havesome power over an author might take the impact factor of the journal in which a paper is publishedas a rigid indicator of the quality of the paper. This is easier to do than to read the paper and tomake a direct judgment.

Once you have tentatively selected a journal, you should do a task-oriented study of the journaland decide just how you might take the characteristics of the journal into account when writingthe paper.

Allan Pierce

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Every journal has a characteristic style, and you really should adhere to the style of the journalin which you wish to write. Whatever you do, don’t waste your time arguing with editors aboutlong-standing style conventions.

Every journal article should have some semblance of scholarship and you must cite references.The modern-day problem is that it is too easy with computers and the internet to do a superficialliterature search. Good authors use a lot of constraint in their citations.

Allan Pierce

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One of the biggest temptations for inexperienced authors is to write papers with too big ascope. A paper in a journal should be very specific. Other papers addressing other topics arealways possible.

One extreme is to write one’s paper so that there is insu"cient information. There needs tobe enough that the reader can either agree that the statements are correct or that the reader canreproduce the results independently.

Allan Pierce

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If you write a paper without giving the matter a lot of thought, don’t expect the readers orthe editors to like it. Here is a list of features in a paper that can be especially irritating.

Most journals use a peer-review system for determining which papers should be published.Such a system is far from perfect. The statement below is adapted from a famous quotation fromWinston Churchill, writing about democracy as a system of government. Not all that great, buthard to conceive of anything better.

Allan Pierce

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When one submits a paper electronically to a journal such as JASA, a lot of things that cango wrong. Here are a couple of possibilities.

More possibilities: the paper is immediately deemed unsuitable or the editor can’t think of asuitable reviewer. The dice here symbolize the long-standing perception (or perhaps a reality) thatsubmitting a paper to a journal is a like rolling dice (a crap-shoot).

Allan Pierce

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Also a possibility: no reviewer who is asked is willing to review the paper. Some reviewersmay agree to do a review, but never deliver. Keep in mind that reviewers are volunteers, and theyare not paid for writing reviews.

It is good advice that an author recognize at the beginning that all the things mentioned abovecan possibly happen. The author does have a few ways of heading o! such problems, and here is alist.

Allan Pierce

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Despite the ardent hopes of authors and some editors, very few papers are accepted immedi-ately. A common situation is that the author is “allowed” to submit a revision, with some guidancegiven as to the nature of the revision.

It is unfortunate, but reviewers come in all sizes and shapes. The editors sort of have to be niceto reviewers, because they are volunteers and they are doing the journal and, to a certain extent, theauthors a favor. However, many reviews are close to being inane and the authors have to becomeaccustomed to occasionally see statements in a review that are really silly. Editors are encouragedto delete such statements when transmitting the review, but there is a counter-argument that theeditors should transmit all remarks, regardless of whether or not they may sense.

Usually, the decision letter will include the Editor’s personal assessment of the paper, and itis this assessment to which you should pay the most attention.

All reviewer remarks should be taken as suggestions, not as orders, even though some reviewsare written in the form as direct orders. At the Workshop in Portland, one of the questions fromthe audience was to what extent should one let a reviewer dictate changes that were contrary towhat would make sense to the authors. The answer, of course, is that the author should makeno changes that they think are total nonsense. However, in minor cases, when one could arguereasonably well on either side of the issue, it is perhaps prudent to humor the reviewers.

Keep in mind that the person who makes the decision is ultimately the editor, and it is usuallyappropriate to assume that a good editor will “listen to reason.”’ If you cannot convince the editoron a critical point, then you still have the option of withdrawing the paper and submitting it to adi!erent journal.

Allan Pierce

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Here is a summary of advice on what you should do in the process of submitting a revision.

The eventual publication of a paper after it is submitted to a journal can take a lot of time. Youcan partially avoid this by picking journals and editors who have a good reputation for expeditioushandling of manuscripts. Also, good writing at the outset helps. Other things that an author cancontrol are discussed in the earlier portions of this paper.

Allan Pierce

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