In our February "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:
I'm curious about others thoughts on this, especially in light of the ongoing conversations about a scarcity of reviewers.
I recently learned that a journal (that will remain nameless) has adopted an interesting policy in an attempt to become more prestigious: reject a significantly larger percentage of submissions. This strategy is relevant to reviewer scarcity because many (if not most) of these rejections are desk rejections.
Does this seem like an artificial way for a journal to become more prestigious? I'm not sure, maybe it's just brilliant! After all, people value things that are harder to obtain/achieve, and one way to make a journal article seem more valuable (on a CV, for instance), is to make it scarce Maybe prestige itself is somewhat artificial, and this is just an excellent illustration of that.
One reader submitted the following reply:
I worry about this type of tale. How on earth would you come to learn this? Or is it some sort of urban myth floating around. I assume any journal that aimed to do this would want to hide the fact.
I'm not sure about this. Why would a journal want to hide that they are becoming more selective? William Peden submitted the following more nuanced response:
If the desk rejections are arbitrary, it's an artificial but also quite risky strategy. To develop prestige, a journal needs a reputation as both as place where bad submissions tend to be rejected AND where good submissions tend to be accepted. Risking the latter has consequences, e.g. if authors send work they think is great to a journal and it gets desk rejected, then the authors might reason that the journal isn't a good fit for their future research, even if the author thinks that research is excellent. On the other hand, if the desk rejections are not arbitrary, then this can be a good way to justifiably obtain prestige. Again, there is a risk: firstly, if the journal has a problem of too many submissions, this policy can make it worse! That's because authors would rather have a quick desk rejection that waiting months and months for editors to find reviewers. Secondly, if the journal doesn't have an oversubmission problem but lacks prestige, a high rate of desk rejections can make the attractiveness of submitting there even lower. How can all of these incentives interact? I am collaborating with some economists to model exactly that sort of question. One thing we have proven beyond all reasonable doubt: smart editors should always desk accept our papers.
This seems right. Increasing selectivity (and openly signaling this) could increase a journal's perceived prestige, but it's a risky strategy–and so what I expect more often happens is that good journals slowly become more selective as their prominence and submission numbers increase, so as to mitigate these risks. But I'm not a journal editor, so I'm just speculating here. What do you all think? It might be good to hear from journal editors in particular!
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