10-8 Writing and Publishing Scientific Articles
will be accepted by the journal, nor does he know in what issue it would be published if it is accepted. He does know that his review is scheduled for publication early next year. Questions: How does this case violate the principles of confidentiality governing peer review? Could John contact the other embryology journal to get their permission to use Dr. Jones’ report? Could he contact Dr. Jones? If he reported Dr. Jones’ findings without the permission of either the journal or author in the hope that Dr. Jones’ paper will be published before his review, what dilemma might he find himself in? Dual Submission Dual submission is the unacceptable practice of submitting the same manuscript to 2 or more journals at the same time. Why do authors do it? They do it for 1 reason, and that is to avoid having to wait to get a decision from 1 journal before sending the manuscript to the next journal — a wait of as much as 2 to 3 months. It is done to speed the process and thereby ensure that the author gets his or her article into print as quickly as possible. This is an understandable temptation, but it is wrong for several reasons. The first reason is that journals do not allow dual submission, and this is usually stated in the journals’ instructions to authors. Journals do not allow dual submission because twice as many reviewers and twice as much staff time will be taken up in the peer review process. In other words, dual submission wastes a lot of people’s time. A second reason is that dual submission puts other authors who are observing all the rules at a disadvantage — first by putting the paper ahead of papers by authors who are patiently waiting for a decision on their article before sending it to another journal, and second by tying up 2 sets of reviewers, who are not then free to review other manuscripts. It is highly unlikely that dual submission will go undetected. Often there are only a few reviewers with the right expertise to review a manuscript in a particular area, and a manuscript sent to 2 different journals may very well get sent to the same reviewer or reviewers, who will immediately detect the dual submission.
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