Researchers hope more journals will release manuscript data to help them better understand possible biases in scientific publishing.
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It’s no secret that it’s harder than ever to get published in a top scientific journal.
Faculty remain under the age-old pressure to publish or perish, especially in big-name journals that carry the most influence with tenure and promotion committees, other scientists, and public policymakers. Meanwhile, submissions are at an all-time high, in part because generative AI has helped ramp up the production of papers (of varying quality). One analysis shows that the number of articles indexed in the Web of Science database increased by 47 percent—from 1.7 million to 2.5 million—between 2015 and 2024, far outpacing the growth of the scientific workforce.
That competition also translates to low acceptance rates at top-tier peer-reviewed journals, which range between 5 and 8 percent at Science, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Economic Review.
