Wednesday, 3 April 2019

publications - Submitting multiple distinct papers to the same journal


I've recently submitted three papers to the same top journal over a period of two weeks. Can this fact alone impact on the chances of any of the papers being accepted? There is no overlap of content or dependencies among the papers, but I'm a bit worried that it may look odd from the editor's perspective and raise doubts on my work.



Answer



I imagine this may be field and journal dependent, but in mathematics (where we have lots of journals that can be good fits for the same paper, unlike some other fields), this can reduce the chance of acceptance. Editors are under pressure to reject lots of submissions (e.g., they may have quotas), and if you have two (or more) simultaneous submissions, and the decisions are not no-brainers, many editors like accept one and reject the other(s).


Note: in mathematics, there's a tendency (not a strict rule) for people not to publish the in the same journal too often, and one of my colleagues recently got a rejection because they has "published too recently" in that journal. (I don't think it's good to enforce this practice as a rule, but apparently some people do.)


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