Getting my paper read after two months!

Eugen G Tarnow  May 6 2011 05:48:50 AM

After prompting I finally received a letter from the editor of Journal of Cognitive Psychology.  My paper had been sitting in their inbox for more than two months apparently because she was moving.  You think there might be an apology in it?  a very minimal one!

But she also raises one of my pet peeves:  unless one performs one more experiment the paper is not considered novel.  The editor has no real understanding of what is science, and she is no different from most of the workers in the field...

Dear Dr Tarnow,

I am writing you concerning your manuscript #ECP-BA 11-34 entitled "The free recall search process introduces errors in short term memory but apparently not in long term memory" which you recently submitted to the Journal of Cognitive Psychology (JCP). I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. In the past few months, the journal has welcomed a huge number of newly submitted manuscripts.

On the basis of a careful reading of your manuscript, I have decided to return the manuscript to you without review. JCP receives many more manuscripts than it can publish, and I have to make heavy demands on the time and energy of my Associate Editors and the expert reviewers associated with the journal. This implies that I can only send out manuscripts for review that have a reasonable chance of appealing to JCP’s broad readership. I’m sorry for having to convey this disappointing decision to you. I summarize below some of the key issues with the manuscript that have led me to this view.

The half-a-page introduction is very brief, and lacks a clear theoretical and empirically justified motivation for the research question you sought to address. The Introduction is basically an enumeration of different studies. A related problem pertains to the novelty of your study. As you state at the beginning of your method section, ‘This article does not itself involve any new experiments ..’. Rather, the paper reports a reanalysis of four published studies that were published 15, 16, 41 and 49 years ago. Without a clear and convincing theoretical reason that motivates the re-analysis of data published decades ago, the added value of such a re-analysis remains unclear. As it currently stands, your paper seems more data-driven than theory-driven in nature. This is a particular concern given that one of the major goals of JCP is to advance theoretical understanding of cognitive processes.

Second, JCP’s readership includes scholars from all fields within Cognitive Psychology and allied disciplines. Not every reader is an expert in the specialized field your manuscript refers to. Your manuscript is densely written and demands specialized knowledge to understand the line of reasoning and the data that are depicted in the figures. As it currently stands, your densely written manuscript will be difficult to understand for the large majority of JCP’s readers.

Finally, as explained in the Notes to Authors on JCP’s website, the style and format of manuscripts should conform to the specifications given in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Your manuscript does not follow some of the basic rules, including the report of statistical analyses and the presentation of the findings.

I am sorry to say that I cannot accept your manuscript for JCP given the extent of the concerns that I outlined above. Because I anticipate that the ultimate conclusion of the review of this manuscript would be for me to not be able to accept it for publication, I felt it best to not subject it to a drawn out review with a foregone conclusion.

I am sorry to have brought you this disappointing news, but I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. You are of course now free to submit your manuscript elsewhere should you choose to do so.

Yours sincerely,


Dr Janet van Hell
Editor-in-Chief
Journal of Cognitive Psychology
jgv3@psu.edu

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