Journals Tussle Over Talent

The competition among journals to be the first to publish groundbreaking research can cost science dearly in grants for fruitless follow-up | By Sam Jaffe

Artwork: Erica P. Johnson

Like many scientists, Xi He has experienced acute competition between prestige journals Science, Nature, and Cell. While at a research conference at the Keystone resort in Colorado two years ago, he spoke with an editor of one of these top-tier journals. He told the editor about promising research on cell signaling in the course of embryo development.¹ The editor urged him to submit his paper. "I've never had an editor request a submission before," He, who has published in all three journals, says. "It's always been the other way around."

The paper wasn't published in that journal. During the peer review process, the editors discovered that another prestige publication planned to print a similar paper by one of He's rivals. "In the end the research got published in a good journal," says He, who requested that the names of the journals involved not be mentioned because he has no hard feelings in the matter. He describes the process as a learning experience. "That's just how things work these days."

It hasn't always been so. In the 1960s the primary task of a Science or Nature editor was to open the day's mail and check for unsolicited manuscripts. But Cell emerged in the 1970s as a significant competitor, and its practice of aggressively recruiting top-notch scientists changed the industry. Indeed, the very essence of scientific publishing changed, as rapid advances in laboratory equipment and information systems reduced the time required to transform findings from the research bench into dried ink. Today, a key task of editors at the prestige journals is travel to conferences and labs for recruiting star scientists to write for their publications.

The competition for star scientists and hot papers can be intense. Flattery is the most common weapon in the editors' war chest, but a promise to speed the review process can be a valuable tool as well.

Conventions can even be relaxed if a paper presents landmark findings. Science

was so intent to publish the human genome paper in 2001 and the rice genome paper a year later that it allowed the authors to control access to the underlying data. "I felt that this competitiveness was coming in even to the extent of altering publication rules," says John Sulston of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England.

But blame isn't due only to the journal editors. The scientific community shares responsibility because of its excessive reliance on these three publications. "A scientist's career is often made or broken by his ability to get into those journals," says Frank Solomon, a biology professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has done quantitative studies on the increase of competition overall in the world of science. "Too many people stop reading after they see the title of a journal on a resume. You cede your responsibility of determining the quality of the work to the journal editors, which means that they're the ones who are deciding who gets the job, the tenure, and the grant. That's not a responsibility they should be burdened with."

GENTLE RIVALS Scientific publishing used to be a more leisurely venture. "If I got excited by a paper, I would send a letter to the authors, who would respond and then we'd keep up a correspondence that would usually last months," says Miranda Robertson, recounting her early days in the 1970s as a Nature editor. (Today she is the managing director of New Science Press, whose parent company, Current Science, is a sister company of The Scientist.) "A quick turnaround from the first letter to being in print would have been six months."

Today, a paper can appear in print eight days after its original submission. That schedule can send a top scientist from a big lab to the journal that publishes fastest, to outrace competitors who could be working on the same experiments. Some see the celerity as a positive for all concerned. "They now review the papers more quickly [than before]," says Bradford Lowell, an associate professor of medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. "These things are very good, both from the authors' and readers' point of view."

Others take a more pessimistic view. "The thing that worries me is the speeded-up review process," Sulston says. "It could lead to more errors."

And errors are the bane of the prestige journals. It's not that more mistakes are made in these journals than others, says Tak Wah Mak, a biologist in the Department of Medical Biophysics of the University of Toronto. "If anything, they make fewer mistakes than most publications, but the impact of a mistake in a prestige journal is much worse." The problem, Mak says, is that it takes years for erroneous information to be retracted and pulled from the databases, if ever. Meanwhile, because of the journals' importance, science pays a high cost for any mistakes that haste can bring. "An exciting paper in Science, Nature, or Cell will launch dozens of research projects around the world and take up millions of dollars in research grants," he says. "If a priest tells a lie, a few people are affected. If a bishop tells a lie, the impact is greater. But if the pope tells a lie, the whole world suffers. These journals have almost as sacred a mission to keep mistakes from happening as the pope does."

The editors of Nature insist that their quest for a quick turnaround causes no more mistakes than would occur in a more methodical process. "Journals have to offer a decent service ... fast review, helpful peer reviewers and editorial input," says Phil Campbell, the editor of Nature. "I see nothing bad in the above."

Cell editor Vivian Siegel says reducing the time between submission and publication does not dilute the review process.

"I believe for the most part that when we ask reviewers to re-view a paper in 24 to 48 hours, the reviewer simply makes the paper the top priority once it arrives," she says. "Most of the delay in reviewing comes from reviewers not starting to review a paper until weeks after receipt, rather than taking weeks to think about it."

Science editors issued the following statement: "We will receive close to 9,000 submissions this year, most of which are unsolicited. Our editors work very diligently to evaluate those submissions, with the goal of selecting for publication those papers that will have the greatest impact across the many disciplines that encompass the scientific arena."

Photo: Courtesy of John Sulston
John Sulston

NONSTARS DAZZLE, TOO Probably the biggest complaint about the increased competition among journals is that scientists who lack fame or lavish grants must work harder to get their work published. "It's clear that the last name on the author list, if it's well-known enough, grants the paper a wild card to pass through the first editorial decision," says Philippe Pierre, a group leader at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy, who publishes frequently in the prestige journals. He asserts that in the end, peer review ensures the integrity of the science published in those journals. But the damage to lesser-known researchers who get cut during the first round of editing hurts talented people who most need recognition.

Ritu Dhand, biology editor of Nature, insists she pays more attention to the paper's quality than to the writer's notoriety. "All I'm interested in is the next piece of great work," she adds. "I don't care who does it, where it's done, or who's behind it."

A glance at the papers in the top-tier journals shows that not all writers are superstars. Ask Robert Hollingsworth, a scientist with the US Department of Agriculture in Hawaii. In the June 27th issue of Nature, Hollingsworth's article stands out among papers reporting results from complex biochemical experiments that took years of work and millions of grant dollars to complete.² He measured the population decrease of slugs and snails after coffee grounds were added to garden soil. His results could change the habits of millions of home gardeners and maybe even alter global agriculture. "Perhaps my paper was accepted because it has wide appeal," says Hollingsworth, who had never before published in the three prestige journals.

Nevertheless, most authors in these publications are recognized superstars. Hundreds of other scientists doing work that is just as interesting don't get nearly as much play. How can researchers ensure that editors judge papers by the quality of the science, and not by the name of the author or the prestige of the institution? One potential change is the emergence of online journals and self-publication, which pose a real threat to the prestige journals' dominance. "My own view is that sooner or later we'll go to an entirely web-based publication system that will create sufficient anarchy to disempower the editors of [the prestige journals]," says Steven Harrison, the Higgins Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard University, who has published and reviewed frequently at all three journals.

Sam Jaffe (sam.jaffe@verizon.net) is a freelance writer in Philadelphia.

©2002, The Scientist Inc.