ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS Research Articles

Editorial Policy and Style Information

Editorial Policy and Style Information

Guidelines for prospective authors to submit acceptable manuscripts to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

The Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) has recently compiled a list of problems in the manuscripts submitted to JASA that often lead to an outright rejection by the Associate Editors handling their review. These problems often occur during submission and writing of a manuscript. They include selecting a title, listing the authors, composing an abstract, defining the scope of work, presenting the background and significance of the research, reporting and discussing the major discovery, ideas and results, showing the work and results that have been published by others in other journals already, drawing concise conclusions, citing references, displaying equations, figures, tables, etc. Last but not the least is the English writing that should be grammatically correct and easy to understand by someone with a similar background. This talk gives a quick overview of these potential problems, which are frequently shown in the manuscripts submitted by authors overseas. The goal of this talk is to provide helpful suggestions and guidelines to the prospective authors whose native language is not English to submit manuscripts that can pass the initial screening and ultimately get published in JASA. Disguised examples of some problematic manuscripts are discussed and analyzed.

Appreciation

Appreciation Donald F. Moores This represents the last edition of the Annals in my 21-year tenure. When I replaced Mc Cay Vernon as editor I had no idea that I would continue for seven 3-year appointments. It has been a labor of love, one of the most rewarding experiences in my career. I had the satisfaction of seeing the Annals grow from a predominantly North American publication to one with a global reach. My greatest pleasure was playing a part in the dissemination of such wide-ranging scholarly publications of benefit to deaf children and adults by both deaf and hearing scholars. I estimate that we received more than 1,500 manuscripts for review, of which almost 600 saw print, usually after revision. There was the satisfaction of moving over the years from deciding which manuscripts were acceptable for publication to the point where we had the option of deciding which of the acceptable manuscripts we would print. My respect for colleagues in our field could not be higher. The Annals is the official organ of the Conference of Educational Administrators of Schools and Programs for the Deaf and the Council of American Instructors of the Deaf. I deeply appreciate their support and especially the contributions of the members of the Joint Annals Administrative Committee through the whole period and I want to thank the more than fifty professional colleagues who served on the Annals editorial board during my tenure for the care and thought that went into their manuscript reviews. I was fortunate to have the continuity provided by the two committee chairpersons during the entire period, Edwards E. Corbett and E. Ross Stuckless. All three of us were students together at Gallaudet and they provided outstanding leadership and guidance to the Annals. I also want to pay tribute to members of the Gallaudet University Press, which has published the Annals over the last several years. Special thanks go to Ivey Wallace, Deirdre Mullervy, and Dan Wallace at the Press for their professionalism, support, and collegiality. Vince Ercolano was the copy editor for around 500 of the published articles and, in addition to his outstanding skills, he was always a pleasure to work with. Numerous graduate students at Gallaudet and the University of North Florida have contributed to the success of the Annals. Over the last year, Amber Moore, Amy Joyner, and Kelsey Alderfer deserve special mention. I want to congratulate Peter V. Paul, a colleague, collaborator, and friend, for his appointment as editor. I am confident he will move the Annals onward and upward to new heights. Finally, my gratitude to Margery Miller for providing support, encouragement, and professional insight far above and beyond the call of duty to my work as editor. [End Page 619] Copyright © 2011 Conference of Educational Administrators of Schools and Programs for the Deaf

Genes, Brain and Behavior entering its second year

With this issue, Genes, Brain and Behavior (G2B) is entering its second year of publication. We can look back on a successful first year. With the help of numerous authors and referees, we succeeded in publishing four issues in a timely manner, filled with many interesting articles that covered a wide range of organisms and subjects. G2B strives to publish only material of the highest quality. Therefore, despite the fact that our Associate Editors and referees try to work as much as possible with authors to produce acceptable manuscripts, our rejection rate is quite high for a new journal and currently hovers around 40%. Nevertheless, submission rates have increased considerably and we are therefore pleased to announce that starting immediately, G2B will be published bimonthly. Our publisher is to be commended for succeeding in keeping the increase in subscription rates significantly lower than this net page increase of 50% would justify. Another exciting development is that G2B has been recently accepted for coverage by Current Contents and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE ) after publication of only four issues in 2002. Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and Chemical Abstracts have also agreed to include G2B in their databases and the journal is currently being reviewed by several other abstracting services. This early coverage (back-dated to issue 1:1) by leading indexing services is a testament to the high quality of work already published in G2B, and confirms that the field of behavioral neurogenetics is establishing a voice of its own through G2B. A further development is that starting this year, G2B will publish articles individually online after receipt of fully corrected page proofs from authors and in advance of the issue compilation through the Blackwell Publishing service Online Early. This means that each article will be published as soon as it is ready, rather than waiting for the next printed issue. This online version of the article will be final, i.e. no further corrections or changes will be made (apart from the bibliographic details such as volume, issue, and page numbers which will be added when the printed issue is compiled). These individual articles will be found at a G2B Current Articles location at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com, and can be cited by quoting the DOI (digital object identifier) number that will appear on the first page of each article. This development, taken together with our fully electronic editorial office (http://g2b.manuscriptcentral.com) and fast editorial decisions (currently the mean delay between submission and initial editorial decision is only 20 days), means that G2B can offer very rapid publication of the latest research to both authors and readers. New journals generally pose an important disadvantage to authors in that their readership is often quite limited, reducing the visibility of the articles that they publish. G2B does not suffer from this constraint. From the start, G2B has been available free to all members of the International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society (IBANGS), as well as to many institutional subscribers around the world. This visibility will be further increased by the inclusion of G2B in important abstracting services and, from January 2003, in the Blackwell consortial license reaching over 1400 libraries and pharmaceutical companies, and including many institutions in developing countries. This will immediately increase the availability of the journal, with around 10 million researchers and clinicians having access to G2B via library consortial sites. Finally, late last year, the Editorial Board of G2B was augmented with the addition of several international specialists from the fields of behavioral and neural genetics. With these latest additions, our Editorial Board now comprises an even more stellar group of researchers, covering a wide geographic and thematic diversity. All these exciting new developments demonstrate G2B's continuing commitment not only to publishing the highest quality behavioral neurogenetics research, but also to doing so rapidly and with the widest of international access. Find out more about G2B online at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com; to contribute to the journal as an author or referee, register at http://g2b.manuscriptcentral.com.

Expedited Publication of Accepted Manuscripts in Circulation

The Editors of Circulation are pleased to announce that we shall initiate our effort to provide even more rapid access to all original scientific articles that have been accepted for publication …

Reasons reviewers reject and accept manuscripts: the strengths and weaknesses in medical education reports.

Scientific journals rely on peer review to maintain the high quality and standards of papers accepted for publication. The purpose of this study was to explore the strengths and weaknesses of medical education reports by analyzing the ratings and written comments given by external reviewers. The author conducted a content analysis of reviewers' comments on 151 research manuscripts submitted to the 1997 and 1998 Research in Medical Education conference proceedings. The negative comments on 123 manuscripts that received "questionable, probably exclude" or "definitely exclude" overall ratings from at least one reviewer were evaluated. A similar analysis was performed on reviewers' positive comments for 28 manuscripts recommended unanimously for acceptance. On average, four peers (4.1, SD = 0.97, range = 2-6) reviewed each manuscript. Of those recommended for exclusion, a mean of 2.3 reviewers recommended exclusion and each reviewer wrote a mean of 8.1 (SD = 5.7) reasons. The top ten reasons for rejection were: inappropriate or incomplete statistics; overinterpretation of results; inappropriate or suboptimal instrumentation; sample too small or biased; text difficult to follow; insufficient problem statement; inaccurate or inconsistent data reported; incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated review of the literature; insufficient data presented; and defective tables or figures. The main strengths noted in accepted manuscripts were the importance or timeliness of the problem studies, excellence of writing, and soundness of study design. While overstating the results and applying the wrong statistics can be fixed, other problems that the reviewers identified (ignoring the literature, designing poor studies, choosing inappropriate instruments, and writing poor manuscripts) are likely to be fatal flaws warranting rejection.

RECENTLY ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS

RECENTLY ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS

RECENTLY ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS

RECENTLY ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS

RECENTLY ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS

RECENTLY ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTS

Writing manuscripts for a scientific journal

This article provides general guidelines on preparing yourself to write for a scientific publication, organising your work to meet the standards of acceptable manuscripts, writing to avoid frequently forgotten common rules of grammar and incorrectly used words, and double-checking and prereviewing your manuscript for accuracy, clarity, preciseness, and thoroughness. Numerous examples are included to demonstrate the guidelines being advocated. Although writing successfully for a scientific publication is not easy, the task could be made simpler by reviewing and following the guidelines provided.

Accepted Manuscripts

Journal Article Accepted Manuscripts Get access The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 101, Issue 3, August 1986, Pages 659–661, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/101.3.659 Published: 01 August 1986