Submission policy similarity and resubmission burden across the top 50 ophthalmology journals

This study analyzed submission policies across the top 50 ophthalmology journals and found that despite some common requirements, significant heterogeneity and modest similarity exist between journals, creating a substantial reformatting burden for authors resubmitting systematic reviews.

The Gist

Imagine you are a chef who has spent months perfecting a signature dish (your scientific research). You want to serve it to the world, so you try to get it into the most prestigious restaurant in town (a top-tier journal).

However, every restaurant has its own strict, unique rules about how the food must be plated, what size the menu description must be, and whether you need to list every single spice used.

If the first restaurant rejects your dish, you don't just walk away. You want to take that same delicious meal to the next best restaurant. But here's the problem: The second restaurant's rules are totally different from the first. You have to re-plate the food, rewrite the menu description, and change the spice list just to get it through the door, even though the taste of the dish hasn't changed at all.

This is exactly what the researchers in this paper investigated. They looked at the top 50 eye-specialty journals (ophthalmology) to see how similar their "rules" are.

The Big Discovery: A World of Mismatched Rules

The team found that these journals are not like a chain of fast-food restaurants where the rules are the same everywhere. Instead, they are like 50 independent, high-end boutiques, each with its own bizarre and specific dress code.

• The "Word Count" Chaos: Only about half of the journals even told you how long your story could be. For the ones that did, the limits varied wildly. It's like one restaurant saying, "Your menu description must be exactly 250 words," while the next says, "No more than 2 pages," and a third just says, "Keep it short."
• The Missing Manuals: Many journals didn't write down their rules clearly. It's like walking into a restaurant where the host says, "We have rules, but we didn't write them down. You'll have to guess what they are when you get there."
• The "Reformatting" Tax: Because the rules are so different, when a researcher gets rejected, they have to spend hours (sometimes days) just changing the formatting. They aren't improving the science; they are just changing fonts, moving paragraphs, and counting words to fit the new restaurant's template. The study estimates this "administrative tax" costs researchers billions of dollars and millions of hours every year globally.

The "Similarity Score" Tool

To help chefs (researchers) navigate this maze, the authors created a "Similarity Score."

Think of this like a travel app that tells you: "If you just got kicked out of Restaurant A, here are the top 5 restaurants that have almost the exact same rules."

• How it works: They compared every journal against every other journal (over 1,200 pairs!) and gave them a score from 0 to 1.
  • 1.0 means the rules are identical (you can just walk in and serve your dish).
  • 0.0 means the rules are completely different (you have to rebuild the kitchen).
• The Result: Most journals scored around 0.64. This is a "C" grade. It means they are somewhat similar, but you will still have to do a lot of work to adapt your manuscript. Even the top 5 most famous journals only shared about 75% of their rules with each other.

The "Anchor" Strategy

The researchers picked the top 5 most famous journals (the "Anchors") and asked: "If you get rejected from these big names, where should you go next to do the least amount of work?"

They found that while there are some "safe bets" (journals with very similar rules), there are still annoying little differences. For example, even if the word count is the same, one journal might demand a specific "structured abstract" (like a fill-in-the-blank form), while the other allows a free-flowing story. These small differences are what cause the most frustration.

Why This Matters

The paper argues that the current system is broken. It wastes the time of scientists, doctors, and students who should be curing diseases or discovering new treatments, not playing "formatting whack-a-mole."

The Takeaway:

1. Don't guess: If you are rejected, don't just pick the next famous journal randomly. Use data to find the one with the most similar rules to save yourself time.
2. Publishers need to step up: Journals should be more transparent. They should clearly state their rules (like word counts and registration requirements) upfront, rather than hiding them or changing them at the last minute.
3. Standardization: If all journals agreed on a basic set of rules (like "all abstracts must be 250 words"), it would save the scientific community a massive amount of time and money.

In short, the paper is a call to stop making researchers waste their lives on paperwork and start letting them focus on the science.

Technical Summary

1. Problem Statement

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are critical to evidence-based ophthalmic practice, yet the process of submitting and resubmitting these manuscripts is operationally complex.

• The Burden: When a manuscript is rejected, authors must often spend significant time (estimated at 3–4 hours per resubmission) on technical reformatting and administrative compliance rather than scientific revision.
• The Cause: High-impact journals exhibit substantial heterogeneity in their submission policies (e.g., word limits, abstract structures, registration requirements, PRISMA compliance). These requirements are often inconsistently stated, incomplete, or embedded in general instructions not tailored to systematic reviews.
• The Gap: There is a lack of empirical data quantifying the similarity between journal policies, making it difficult for authors to strategically select resubmission targets that minimize administrative friction.

2. Methodology

The study employed a cross-sectional analysis of the top 50 ophthalmology journals based on the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).

• Sampling:
  • Journals were selected from the SJR portal in descending order of prestige.
  • Inclusion Criteria: Journals must explicitly accept systematic reviews/meta-analyses and must not be "invite-only."
  • Exclusion: Invite-only titles or those rejecting systematic reviews were replaced by the next highest-ranked eligible journal until 50 were identified.
• Data Extraction:
  • Policies were extracted from author instruction webpages using a predefined data dictionary.
  • Variables: Reporting/registration (e.g., PROSPERO), abstract format/length, manuscript length, reference limits, figure/table limits, preprint policies, and required submission components.
  • Handling Missing Data: Fields not explicitly stated were coded as "missing" rather than assumed, utilizing an available-case denominator approach.
• Similarity Metric:
  • Gower Similarity Coefficient: Used to compute pairwise similarity on a 0–1 scale across mixed variable types (binary, categorical, and numeric).
  • Calculation:
    • Categorical/Binary: 1 for exact match, 0 otherwise.
    • Numeric: $1 - (\frac{|value_1 - value_2|}{range})$.
    • Missing fields were excluded from the specific pair calculation, with weights renormalized.
• Analysis:
  • Anchor Journals: The top 5 highest SJR journals (Ophthalmology, JAMA Ophthalmology, American Journal of Ophthalmology, Survey of Ophthalmology, Ophthalmology Retina) served as "anchors."
  • Resubmission Simulation: Candidate journals were ranked by similarity to each anchor to generate resubmission recommendations.
  • Sensitivity Analysis: Rankings were re-evaluated by weighting policy mismatches based on anticipated effort (mild vs. strong weighting) to test robustness.

3. Key Contributions

• Quantification of Heterogeneity: The study provides the first empirical quantification of policy similarity across high-impact ophthalmology journals, moving beyond anecdotal evidence to a data-driven framework.
• Development of a Similarity Framework: Introduces a Gower coefficient-based approach to generate "resubmission recommendations," allowing authors to identify policy-aligned targets.
• Identification of "Friction Points": Pinpoints specific policy areas (abstract limits, registration, structure) that cause the most reformatting burden, even among similar journals.
• Transparency Tool: Created a dashboard (S1 Table) and specific recommendations to help authors anticipate mismatches before resubmitting.

4. Key Results

• Policy Incompleteness:
  • Only 58% (29/50) of journals stated a main-text word limit; only 23 provided a numeric limit (Median: 4,000 words).
  • 96% stated an abstract word limit (Median: 250 words).
  • Limits on references, figures, and tables were rarely stated (20–28%).
  • Only 8% (4/50) explicitly permitted "format-flexible" initial submissions.
• Registration & Reporting:
  • 70% (35/50) explicitly required PRISMA compliance.
  • Only 12% (6/50) explicitly required prospective registration (e.g., PROSPERO).
• Similarity Scores:
  • Across 1,225 journal pairs, the median similarity was 0.64 (IQR 0.57–0.71), indicating only modest alignment.
  • Only 8.5% of pairs had a similarity score $\ge$ 0.80.
  • Among the top 5 anchor journals, similarity ranged from 0.62 to 0.90 (Median: 0.75).
• Resubmission Recommendations:
  • Even for the top similarity-ranked candidates, mismatches were common.
  • Top Mismatches: Abstract word limits (40%), registration requirements (30%), and abstract structure (26%).
• Sensitivity Analysis:
  • Recommendations remained robust when weighting mismatches by effort. Spearman correlation between unweighted and effort-weighted rankings ranged from 0.80 to 0.96.

5. Significance and Implications

• For Authors: The study offers a strategic tool to reduce the "resubmission burden." By selecting journals with high policy similarity, authors can minimize administrative rework, potentially saving hours of labor and accelerating dissemination.
• For Editors and Publishers: The findings highlight a need for:
  • Clearer, review-specific author guidelines.
  • Adoption of format-flexible initial submission policies (allowing submission without strict adherence to house styles), which could reduce administrative overhead for both authors and editorial offices.
  • Harmonization of core submission elements (e.g., abstract structure) across journals.
• Equity: Reducing administrative friction is particularly important for early-career researchers, clinician-scientists with limited protected time, and authors in low-resource settings who lack dedicated editorial support.
• Economic Impact: By addressing the estimated $1 billion annual cost of manuscript reformatting in the broader biomedical literature, this framework suggests a pathway to significant efficiency gains in scientific publishing.

Conclusion: Systematic review submission policies in ophthalmology are highly heterogeneous and often incompletely specified. A similarity-based resubmission framework can effectively guide authors to policy-aligned targets, mitigating avoidable administrative burdens and improving the efficiency of evidence dissemination.