The things you hate most about submitting manuscripts

A few days ago I asked the twittersphere what rubs people up the wrong way when it comes to submitting manuscripts to peer-reviewed academic journals. Oh let us count the ways. From the irritation of having to reformat references to fit some journal’s arbitrary style, to consigning figures and captions to the end of a submission as though it really is still 1988, to the pointlessness of cover letters where all you want to say is “Dear Editor, here is our paper” but feel the need to throw in some bumf about how amazing your results are. (Hint: aside from when the cover letter has a specific purpose, such as summarising a response to reviewers or conveying vital information about a key issue, I can tell you that a lot of editors – maybe most – ignore this piece of puffery.)

The tweet proved a lot more popular than I expected and for a good two days you could see a steam of delicious rage rising from my timeline. 

I had an ulterior motive in seeking out this information from your good selves. As most of you will know, one of my aims is to help improve the transparency and reproducibility of published research, and one of the journals I edit for is working through its (future) adoption of the new Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines. The TOP guidelines are a self-certification scheme in which journals voluntarily report their level of policy compliance with a series of transparency standards, such as data sharing, pre-registration and so forth. TOP is currently endorsed by more than 500 journals and promises to make the degree of transparency adopted by journals itself more transparent. I guess you could call this “meta-transparency”.

Now, in putting together our TOP policy at this journal at which I serve, we realised that it involves the addition of some new submission bureaucracy for authors. There will be a page of TOP guidelines to read beforehand and a 5-minute checklist to complete when actually submitting. We realise extra forms and guidelines are annoying for authors, so at the same time as introducing TOP we are going to strive to cut as much of the other (far less important) shit as possible. 

Here are the things you hated the most, and your most popular recommendations. For fun, I calculated an extremely silly and invalid score of every interaction to this tweet, adding up RTs, favourites and the number of independent mentions of specific points:

Chris Chambers is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University. This blog was originally published on his NeuroChambers blog.