To get an idea of the cost of reformatting, Varga and his colleagues estimated average hourly academic salaries in the United States and the European Union, the time spent reformatting per manuscript (four hours) and the annual number of resubmissions. “When people are more established, they might have a whole team who can help with this piece.” Out of five of Starr’s manuscripts that journals are considering, four of them came back to her within days so she could correct formatting errors the journal staff had found. This time burden disproportionately affects early-career researchers, says Michelle Starr, a paediatric nephrologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. Researchers who spoke to Nature say that they don’t mind formatting their articles to conform to a journal’s style, as long as they’re doing that work after their study has been accepted. Not all journals reject submissions that don’t conform to their specifications, but there’s an implicit pressure to follow them, says Tibor Varga, an epidemiologist at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of the analysis. Paper-mill detector put to the test in push to stamp out fake science Journals set wildly differing limits on the number of characters in a paper’s title, the abstract’s word count, the length of the reference list and more. For example, some journals require graphical abstracts whereas others don’t some combine the results and discussion sections but others keep them separate. It’s mainly the inconsistencies between journals’ guidelines that force researchers to reformat and sometimes rewrite their manuscripts, says Laura Hilton, a cancer genomicist at BC Cancer, a care centre in Vancouver, Canada. “I don’t think it’s a productive use of my time.” Picky, picky “I cannot imagine why anyone would care what an article looks like the first time a journal sees it,” says David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who was not involved with the study. Appalled by that exorbitant cost, the authors of the analysis, which was published in BMC Medicine on 10 May, propose that journals should allow free-format submissions so researchers can spend their time and money on research instead. Now an analysis has put a price tag on all that busy work: US$230 million worth of time was wasted by scientists worldwide reformatting papers sent to biomedical journals in 2021 alone 1. Credit: Tatomm/Gettyįor scientists submitting their papers to journals, there’s an all-too-familiar drill: spend hours formatting the paper to meet the journal’s guidelines if the paper is rejected, sink more time into reformatting it for another journal repeat. Journals have widely differing manuscript-formatting requirements, greatly inconveniencing researchers.
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