Re: Publishing Papers
- From: Straydog <asd@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 10:04:24 -0400
On Sat, 15 Apr 2006, George Orwell wrote:
Is it possible to get papers published in a reputable journal
if one does not have a Ph.D. in the field?
Whether it is possible or not may also depend on how the editor views your cover letter and what kind of letterhead (name, address, phone number) imprint is on it and whether you have a title/position of some kind under your signature that would be consistent with the author _not_ having the letters "PhD" after the name. The editor might give the manuscript a cursory glance and pay attention to style details, how the abstract was written, possibly the reference list, in making a judgement to pass it on to reviewers or a monitoring editor, or returning it to you unreviewed with some kind of remark about its "suitability" for publication. If you are the sole author, it might look a little suspicious since the vast majority of manuscripts submitted today have multiple authors, and often the cover letter could have multiple (or at least two) signatures, too (a wise strategy in an age when there are author-investigator disputes).
Science and Nature return about 90% of their submitted manuscripts, unreviewed, even if they come from faculty at Harvard and MIT, and a few other journals do this, too. Snobbery rules. However, if your manuscript is poorly put together, they will detect this very quickly and you'll get it back in your face without politeness or explanation.
You used the term "reputable journal" where you probably should be asking whether there are journals that publish without peer review, only with peer review, or journals with peer review that are high impact journals (eg. Nature, Science), where the rejection takes place 90% of the time before the review rather than after the review. There are also toilet paper journals that are good for expanding a CV or resume, but almost no one reads anything in them. So, you need to think about what you're trying to accomplish with whatever you are thinking about trying to publish.
Around 1970 I tried to get a manuscript on research I conducted published without the name of my advisor on the author list (and with his knowledge) and it went to a journal on which the editor was a personal friend of my advisor. My MS got rejected without explanation, but I always wondered if the editor made that judgement based on his knowledge that his friend was at my institution (I used letterhead, and signed my name without a degree) and doing the same research as in my MS (and my advisor did get papers published in that journal) and guessing that there was a dispute between myself and my major advisor and the editor didn't want to get involved. I recall attempting, with a followup letter, to ferret out from the editor an answer to this but got no further response. Never assume that any of these guys are angels with pure hearts and willingness to consider, in an honorable-fair-equitable fashion, anything sent in for consideration. Over the years I've heard of a number of stories, not all
good. On the other hand, I once had a MS that got dealt with poorly by a
monitoring editor in my favorite journal to publish and I complained to the editor, explained my case carefully and in detail, and the editor
overrode the monitoring editor's decision to reject the manuscript.
.
- References:
- Publishing Papers
- From: George Orwell
- Publishing Papers
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