Journal shopping in reverse: unethical, impolite, or expected?

A recent article describes a practice unknown to me. Some authors submit papers for review, get positive reviews, then withdraw it if the reviews are positive and try again in another “higher impact” or “better” journal.

It is entirely normal for authors to go “journal shopping” when reviews are bad: submit the article,and if the reviewers don’t like it, resubmit it to another. But this is the first time I’d heard of this process going the other way. It would never even occur to me to do this.

Nancy Gough tweeted her agreement with this article, and said that this behaviour was unethical. And she got an earful. Frankly, online reaction to this article seemed to be summed up as, “I know you are, but what am I?”

A lot of the reaction that I saw (though I didn’t see all of it) seemed to be, “Journals exploit us, so we should exploit journals!” or “Journals should pay us for our time.” This seemed to be a directed at for profit publishers, but people seemed to be lumping journals from for profit publishers and non profit journals from scientific societies together.

The “People in glass houses should not throw stones” have a point, but I’m not sure it addresses the actual issue. Publishers didn’t create the norms of refereeing and peer review. That was us, guys. Scientists. We created the idea that there are research communities. We created the idea that reviewing papers is a service to that community.

I don’t know that I would call “withdraw after positive reviews and resubmit to a journal perceived as better” unethical, but I think it’s a dick move.

Like asking someone to a dance and then never dancing with them. Sure, there’s no rules against it, but it’s not too much to expect a little reciprocity. The “Me first, me only” attitude drags.

Since the whole behaviour is “glam humping” and impact factor chasing, this seems a good time to link out to a couple of articles that point out the many ways that impact factor is deeply flawed: here and here.

I’ve written before about grumpiness about peer review being due in part to an eroded sense of research community. I guess people don’t want to see journals as part of the research community, but they are.

Related posts

A sense of community

External links

Opinion: Stop Gaming Peer Review