Sections from an email

[injuryupdate]

December JSMS was disappointing wrt interest factor, but I thought September was actually not bad and a big improvement. JSMS is a big contrast to AJSM where the papers are always interesting but sometimes scientifically terrible.

Just heard that .... (paper) which won prizes at SMA was rejected outright from AJSM. Probably not revolutionary enough for them despite being very solid and hard to criticise at all from the methodology viewpoint. Shows what a lottery the process is and what a "buyer's market" the journal publication process is (i.e. the journals can always get enough papers so they can afford the false negative error of rejecting a worthy paper).

By all means, please register for the injury update forum and make comments, because I think email exchanges like ours, as long as they remain anoymous with respect to personal criticism, are very interesting for public viewing. The journal publication industry does need a bit of a shake up. However it is always going to suffer from the fact that profitability doesn't equate to acceptance on scientific merit. I see far more internet publications in the future where publishing cost = far less and the good papers can sink or swim based on number of hits to the website.

[injuryupdate]

Personally I would love to see all semi-decent papers on muscle strains etc. published, irrespective of minor limitations, as I am interested in anything on hamstring and groin injuries etc. Problem is that there are sports scientists out there who a fascinated by lactate levels in rowers in the early periodization phase of training who couldn't care less about hamstring strains, and they are competing for the same journal space with equal claims.

The whole submission/ acceptance process has a huge lottery factor to it. For the esbtablished researchers, it is OK in that we win on some occasions and lose on others, and our rejections eventually get published somewhere (even if it is Sport Health on a lot of occasions for me). I get distressed when I hear than an ACSP registrar who is less research orientated but has busted his or her arse to do one semi-decent study to satisfy the college criteria then gets rejected by the same lottery process. I suppose that this is only as unfair as having one horrible examiner knock you over during the exam viva, with the same result.