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Bang for Your Buck: Rejection Rates and Impact Factors in Ecological Journals

When choosing where to submit their research for publication, most ecologists are concerned with journal impact factor, but they are also concerned with the likelihood that their manuscripts will be accepted. Based on a survey of ecologists, we found different degrees of relative concern for these journal attributes depending on author experience and gender. However, the ability of authors to choose among journals based on these journal attributes is limited: while journal impact factors are published regularly, journal rejection rates are not. We obtained, by permission, rejection rate data for a sample of 60 ecology journals for the year 2004. As expected, journals with higher impact factors also have higher rejection rates, but the ratio of (rejection rate) / (impact factor) increases sharply with decreasing impact factor below 1.76. Journals with impact factors below this value therefore provide relatively low payback in terms of impact against cost as estimated by rejection rate. We discuss alternative possible interpretations of this relationship and alternative criteria that might affect an author's decision about journal choice. Most importantly, our analysis indicates that the ability to make informed choices requires that journals publish their rejection rates annually. PREAMBLE How does an author decide where to submit a paper for publication? This important decision is made routinely throughout the career of a typical researching scientist/academic. The choices made can profoundly affect the trajectory, rate of progress, and status of one's research career. Necessarily, the subject category of the journals under consideration must be concordant with the research topic of the paper. However after this, most authors in the field of ecology at least, are usually still presented with more than one choice of a topically suitable subset of candidate journals. And, when the paper is rejected (an experience that few if any manage to avoid completely), the author is commonly inclined to iteratively select alternative journals.