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In our new "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
Given that Nous and PPR have the same editor, how do people choose which one to submit to? And is it unwise to send to the other if rejected by one of them?
Do readers have any helpful insights? I'm particularly interested in the 2nd question!
I’ve heard that their reviewing processes are independent. And after having a paper rejected from one of those journals, I once submitted to the other journal and received a verdict of R&R.
They have the same editor-in-chief, but not the same editors. The editors give the journals different flavors through their decision-making. I think of PPR as a journal more open to out-of-the-box ideas, or ideas that aren’t as trend-driven, in comparison to the other top journals. Sending to one Sosa journal after being rejected by the other is very common.
FWIW (I would post this under my name but I don’t want to ID myself to editors and referees), I recently had an R&R at Nous, the paper got rejected after the R&R, and I sent a (slightly different) version of it to PPR fairly quickly after that, and it got R&R’d again there. You will get a different editor in each case (unless there are some cases where Sosa manages the paper the whole way through himself, but I am assuming it always goes to one of the associate editors), and they will choose different referees, etc. So I think one should just treat them as totally different entities.
Also, how to choose? How do you choose between any two journals? It seems to me that they clearly have different identities and publish different stuff (and that, for example, PPR is much less conservative than Nous). I don’t think this question has a different answer than any other pairwise comparison of journals you are trying to decide whether to send something to — think about what kind of stuff the journal publishes, who the editors are (the associate editors, not the main one), which one is most likely to handle your paper, what kinds of referees they might seek out, whether you engage with a lot of stuff that is published in that journal, etc.
I agree with a datapoint and author. PPR is the more adventurous of the two, Nous is the more conservative.They are similar enough for it to sometimes be worth trying both, so long as you can fit them both into the submission window. I think both journals give the associate editors a lot of discretion, so it is worth thinking about who you are likely to get.
In November I sometimes send my best paper to PPR and my most publishable paper to Nous.
Thanks for the helpful comments, everyone.
Honestly, people substantially overthink the differences between leading generalist journals. At the end of the day, much of your job is to impress referees and they don’t differ that much between leading journals. I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about how to please Nous versus PPR. That time is better spent improving the paper or thinking about how to please referees.
(Perhaps Phil Review is an exception here. I’m not sure.)
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