Why 'Lower Tier' Journals Might Contain Better Work

Originally published on eve.gd on 8 September 2021.

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I was reflecting this morning on the following propositions:

• Higher-tier (high prestige, high exclusivity) journals, to which most academics submit their work first, often have extremely high thresholds for admission. They require three peer reviewers to agree to publication and they also set exacting (and sometimes flawed) criteria for novelty. For instance, in my field, I’ve sometimes had three positive reports on the quality of the analysis etc… but the work rejected from this venue because it was a study of a single author or novel.
• Journals lower down the pecking order will not have such restrictive requirements for novelty. However, assuming these titles themselves conduct a double-blind peer review process, the article will have, by that stage, have benefited from 5 readers, rather than just 3. As readers nearly always suggest changes, and academics usually claim that this improves the work, articles at lower tier journals will have had more community feedback than those accepted at the top.

Some objections:

• It is possible that journal article manuscripts at any tier have been through informal structures of revision and feedback as people pass working papers around. Hence, papers at top “tier” journals might already have been read by a large number of people.
• Journals lower down the pecking order might, one could argue, accept work at a lower threshold of quality than the top-tier titles.
• It could be that the work accepted at the top-tier titles genuinely is already in a very, very good state when it arrives and doesn’t need the additional feedback.

However, nonetheless, the basic point stands: work that has been through multiple rounds of submission, but is eventually published (and most work that is rejected is eventually published elsewhere. See: Weller, Ann C., ‘Editorial Peer Review: Its Strengths and Weaknesses.’, Journal of the Medical Library Association, 90.1 (2001), 115) will have received much more community feedback than work that went straight to the top.