Manuscript Rejection for the Schizophrenia Bulletin: Some Reasons

Since assuming editorial responsibilities for Schizophrenia Bulletin in 2005, there has been an increasing number of high-quality manuscripts submitted to the journal. This is very encouraging and gratifying but made the review process particularly challenging when saying “no” to good papers. Our page budget is especially small for regular articles and decisions are often made rapidly without external review so that there is little delay in submission elsewhere. Other manuscripts will receive a rejection decision after full review, and each category contains many good papers advancing knowledge and ideas that we hope will be published but will not make our tight space. Our acceptance rate is about 20% of ∼400 regular articles that we receive annually, and for these, it takes an average of 108 days from submission to production. Although we are able to publish accepted papers online in a timely manner, we face a large backlog of papers that have been published online but not in print. The Bulletin has developed a broad and diverse readership that we plan to continue to serve. We value our special features that cover several topics including the first person accounts, translational pieces for clinical and basic scientists, Cochrane Corner, and brief reviews on genetic and environmental factors relevant to schizophrenia. The emphasis of this section is on clarity and accessibility to a broader audience. Our theme issues provide timely, comprehensive, and multifaceted review of wide-ranging topics in schizophrenia and continue to be the centerpiece of Schizophrenia Bulletin. As a result, space is particularly tight for regular articles. Here, we seek to publish findings that are new, definitive, and which make substantial advances in schizophrenia research. Currently, we reject about 80% of these submissions, often papers reviewed as “good” or “very good.” The basis for our judgment of rejecting these manuscripts often involves one or more of the following considerations. Data support knowledge already established but extends it to a new geographic or cultural setting or the report is based on a larger sample. Longitudinal or follow-up studies where prognostic and outcome data are reported that generally support existing knowledge, albeit on a new and interesting cohort. Important correlations are reported but lack specificity. For instance, findings of decreased connectivity between 2 brain regions in imaging data in schizophrenia correlated with a specific cognitive function in itself is often not definitive. The data need to show that the disruption in connectivity is regionally specific, and the relationship with the specific cognitive function is unique and not part of the general cognitive/motivational deficit associated with schizophrenia. Important conclusions based on inadequate sample. If schizophrenia is the independent variable, interpretation of dependent measures as reflecting the disease process when other likely sources (eg, drug effects) are not addressed. Reporting similarities across heterogeneous syndromes without clarifying whether the similarities are decisive on diagnostic classification issues or merely expected across syndrome similarities (eg, if 2 psychosis syndromes have a substantial proportion of subjects with anxiety, anxiety-related measures will be observed in both without bearing on the question of separate illnesses or on a continuum). Reports on the negative symptom construct without addressing primary vs secondary causation of negative symptoms. Efficacy conclusions for nonpsychotic domains of pathology (eg, cognition) without addressing the pseudospecificity issue.1,2 Genetic association findings in the absence of replication sample or other converging lines of evidence. Review or meta-analysis papers on a topic covered in publications elsewhere in the past few years. Secondary analyses that may extend published findings without substantially advancing the field. These are some of the examples that guide our decisions. Ideally, we would like to accommodate many more of the high-quality papers that at present are rejected mostly because of limited space. We are now implementing a new set of guidelines for limiting manuscript size (see http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/schbul/for_authors/auth2.html). This would help us with the backlog of online papers ready for print publication and not reject high-quality regular articles.