Acceptance and rejection of manuscripts

The purposes of fills study were to find patients of refereeing practices, and to identify clues to recognize whether the papers in a journal are refereed or not. There have been several qualitative studies of refereeing practices. Other quantitative studies were concerned either with certain geographic areas or separate disciplines. This is a report of a small-scale but global study of a wide field of disciplines and/or missions based on a direct-mail questionnaire. A sample of journal titles was selected from me Linda Hall Library's serial holdings list. The questionnaire to assumedly refereed journals contained six pages and 70 questions. Answers came from 15 countries and 43 disciplines. The return was 72 percent. Another control questionnaire was sent to assumedly nonrefereed journals. The response was 61 percent. Ten percent of the selected journals was found to have been chosen in error in both categories. Editors of journals of varying sizes responded; the smallest received 10 and the largest 900 manuscripts yearly. The answers were handled by data processing using the SPSS (Statistical Program for Social Sciences), Journals were placed in two categories, small or large, so that all the small journals received the same number of manuscripts as those received by the large journals. Where differences between small and large journals were significant, the data are shown separately, otherwise averages are given. The questionnaire dealt with these principal subjects: Rejection by editor without mailing to referee; numbers of referees for long, and short, and for accepted and rejected papers; allotted and actual time for processing papers, guidelines for referees; rewards to referees, such as payment and credit line; use of superreferees in cases of divided opinions; keeping the referees informed on acceptance and rejection and on other referees; the relative standing of author and referee; acceptance and rejection ratio; communication between editor and author; and published guidelines in journal to author. Authors make recommendations with regard to the referee system based on the findings from the questionnaires and other discussions.