4 ms·

So many comments about fonts, subscripts, etc. No one cares about that at review time. I've never heard anyone complain about significant time on this. Major d

So many comments about fonts, subscripts, etc. No one cares about that at review time. I've never heard anyone complain about significant time on this. Major difference in paper _style_ between Nature Brief Communication (2 figures, one page of text) and J Neuroscience full (10 pages and 8 figures). That's a big reformating. Also, Nature has a very specific abstract, which is great for a general science audience (https://www.nature.com/documents/nature-summary-paragraph.pd https://www.nature.com/documents/nature-summary-paragraph.pd) but less so for specialists. Similarly, a clinical trial abstract has exact results so that it's easy to scrape. For the y-combinator audience, it seems obvious to me that a MobiCom and a ACM transactions will be very different papers. Fixing the format doesn't fix this.

memefrog 3y ago
Is it something that needs to be fixed? I surmise that Nature Brief Communication, by its name and the guidelines you gave, is about briefly communicating new results. People read it so that they can get brief summaries of new results in the natural sciences. It would do a disservice to the people that read it if they announced that they wouldn't require one page of text and two figures for new submissions, because it required too much work for authors. If you wrote a novella, and wanted to submit it to a magazine that published short stories, I don't think it would be reasonable to complain that they didn't want to publish your work unless it was edited down to meet their guidelines. Why is it different for scientific papers? It just seems natural to me that different publications would have different audiences and different goals with what they are publishing. They're read by different people for different reasons who want different things from the publication they're paying for. Naturally that means that if you want them to publish your work, it has to be right for their readers. Is there something I'm missing?

memefrog 3y ago

Is it something that needs to be fixed? I surmise that Nature Brief Communication, by its name and the guidelines you gave, is about briefly communicating new results. People read it so that they can get brief summaries of new results in the natural sciences. It would do a disservice to the people that read it if they announced that they wouldn't require one page of text and two figures for new submissions, because it required too much work for authors. If you wrote a novella, and wanted to submit it to a magazine that published short stories, I don't think it would be reasonable to complain that they didn't want to publish your work unless it was edited down to meet their guidelines. Why is it different for scientific papers? It just seems natural to me that different publications would have different audiences and different goals with what they are publishing. They're read by different people for different reasons who want different things from the publication they're paying for. Naturally that means that if you want them to publish your work, it has to be right for their readers. Is there something I'm missing?