The journal of misfit papers

My article is about how I found two journals who accept papers vetoed by other journals in the field, or results for which there are no takers, or when you question current practices. This sprang from the frustration a scientist feels when his or her paper is summarily overruled, or after thorough peer review and its remedy. When overcoming the dejection of having my first paper being returned by a journal, a colleague kindly counselled me by saying, “Welcome to the real world of science, you have just arrived.” Later on, when I had eventually published my work in another journal, I tried to seek avenues for publishing an unaccepted paper per se. Voila! I found these two unusual journals.

One such journal is ‘Rejecta Mathematica’.(1) It publishes mathematics papers. It has a nice editorial on the rejection-acceptance cycle predominating scientific publications in its inaugural issue†. Their requirements are that “submitted research manuscripts must have been previously rejected from a peer-reviewed journal in the mathematical sci­ences,” and that the manuscript must accompany an open letter from the authors stating the full procedure of peer review and final rejection by the previous journal. If you are very disgruntled with your field of research, then they are ready to help you to start a ‘Rejecta’ journal in your field!

Another is the ‘Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine’.(2) As the name suggests, it publishes articles on clinical trials or pharmaceutical sciences. This journal is published by BioMed Central, an open-access publisher of 220 peer-reviewed journals. The impact factor of this journal is 1.10. The impact factor of a journal indicates how many times an article is cited by readers in a given time. The higher the impact factor of a journal, the better its acceptability. This journal publishes failed clinical trials as well as existing or promising drug molecules which fail to live up to their expectations.

An example of such a paper is on the lack of effect of anti-cholesterol drugs Statins are cholesterol-lowering drugs used to treat patients with cardiovascular diseases.(2) However, this particular article published in this journal of negative results in 2011 showed that continued use of statins in Swedish populations between 1998 and 2002 did not lower any incidence of cardiovascular diseases or mortality rate. It is to be noted that this journal has been FEATURE

publishing such papers for the past ten years.

You may find their approach surprising, amusing or weird, but don’t forget that sometimes, there is no balm more soothing for your bruised ego than a publication to announce your efforts in science.

But the purpose of publishing negative results goes deeper. Sometimes the negative results obtained by the researchers can prevent others from redoing the same experiments or alert others about futility of certain medicines. Any failures of medicines in clinical trials need to be known by the doctors and scientists to avoid future use. Many potential drug molecules in clinical trials show severe side-effects in patients. It is also very frequently seen that pathogens develop resistance to antibiotics, anticancer, anti-parasitic or antifungal drugs. Bacteria resistant to antibiotics after rampant use or cancer cells resistant to anticancer drugs are not unknown. Quite often, transgenic plants carrying pesticide genes grow resistant to the pests over the time.

Journals for publishing negative results in life science or medicine can successfully make the scientific commu­nity aware of these particular failures discussed above, such as side effects, or the development of resistance. Sometimes journals specialising in printing rejected pub­lications can offer a contrarian view of present models to the scientific community, and also alert fellow scientists which way to go or avoid.

Journals which publish rejected papers or negating results about medical or biotechnological use of drugs or proteins can carve a niche in the widely-expanding repertoire of scientific journals.

References:

†. Letter from the editors. (2009) Rejecta Mathematica Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-3

‡. Nilsson S, Mölstad S, Karlberg C, Karlsson JE and Persson LG. (2011) No connection between the level of exposition to statins in the population and the incidence/mortality of acute myocardial infarction: An ecologi­cal study based on Sweden’s municipalities. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine , 10:6 (24 May 2011)

1. http://math.rejecta.org/

2. (http://www.jnrbm.com/)

Note: This article written by me appeared first in campus magazine of IIT Bombay in 2011.