Pearls for First-Time Authors Publishing in a Top-Tier Medical Journal

Pharmacists often participate in scholarly activities to advance the profession, but research and publication is still not a robust part of their training. In a descriptive study design looking at pharmacist-authored publications in nine JAMA Network journals, pharmacist-authored publications contributed to 3.0% or less.¹  As such, some evidence suggests less than 5% of pharmacy research projects translate into a publication.² 

Publishing in a high-impact journal is a surrogate marker of the scientific significance of the scholarly work and a scholar’s reputation. Scientific conferences like the American Heart Association have organized career development sessions for young mentees to learn from journal editors but many scientists still wonder if the process is biased. We sought to determine the likelihood of an all-new author team to publish in a high-impact journal.

All articles published in 2019 were extracted through the PubMed database for the following top-tier general medicine journals: The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet, Nature, the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) and the British Medical Journal (BMJ). These journals were selected for having a high impact factor and reputation, being multidisciplinary and having diversity in their impact factors (28–75). Article types were identified through the categorization listed on each journal’s webpage. Only original and review articles were used for this analysis.

Individual authors for each article were searched via PubMed (i.e., Joleme K Reis AND Nature [journal]) and within the scientific journal’s own search tool (via their webpage) to determine whether they had previously published an original article or review in that specific journal. If results showed one or more publications from the same author within a journal, said author was classified as a “returning author.” If an author had no previous publications within the journal, said author was classified as a “new author.” For author name disambiguation, each author’s full name was searched (i.e., Joleme K Reis rather than Reis JK). PubMed and each journal’s online catalog were used to distinguish between authors with similarly abbreviated names. Additionally, author institutions and locations were utilized to aid in distinguishing between authors. Articles with at least one “returning author” were categorized as a publication with authors who have previously published, and articles with all “new author” were categorized as a publication with authors who had never previously published within the journal.

The total number of articles published in NEJM, Lancet, JAMA, Nature and BMJ in 2019 was 1,520, 803, 1,334, 1,554 and 2,028 respectively. Approximately 10% to 13% of original/review articles published in NEJM, Lancet, JAMA or Nature were from a team of all first-time authors compared to 22% from BMJ (Table).

The likelihood of publishing an original article in NEJM by a group of all new authors was 3%, while the chances of publishing a review article in NEJM was 47%. Across all journals, publishing an original article appears to be much harder as a first-time author compared to a review article (3% to 7% versus 19% to 65% respectively).

About 5% of original research submissions achieve publication in NEJM.³  Incorporating our findings, this translates to a 0.16% chance of publishing an original research article by an all-new author team.

Our results provide strategic insights for aspiring researchers and promote the case for blinded peer review of manuscripts. The chaperone effect has been previously described as an effective method for junior authors to benefit from increased rates of publication.⁴  Collaborating with senior authors can open the gateway to authorship by providing structural guidance on the publication process and opportunities to establish important affiliations.⁵  Further, based on our findings, engaging in review articles will likely yield a higher chance of success if being an all-new team of authors. As such, assessing the interest of the editor or section editor prior to submission of the review topic could benefit the likelihood of a successful acceptance.

On the journal’s side, a blinded peer review process may also allow a higher likelihood for new authors to get published in high-impact journals, as it removes any preconceived perceptions from the unblinded reviewer.⁶  While our findings may have some inaccuracies due to its dependence on publicly available data and the manual nature of the analysis, they encourage journal editors to incorporate processes to allow objectivity and diversity (new authors, gender, race, etc.) in the publication process. This analysis is limited in that it provides specific strategies for new author teams to publish in higher-impact journals. Pharmacist and other health care professionals are encouraged to collaborate with other senior authors who have published in high-impact journals. Further, senior authors are encouraged to reach out to early career authors to foster their career development. Starting with a review article may yield a higher success rate over an original research article. While the scope of this article is for publishing in top-tier journals, publishing in a low- to moderate-tier journals can also facilitate the experiences needed to ultimately publish in a top-tier journal. Knowledge of the number of articles rejected that were submitted by new and returning authors would add more color to our analysis but this data is not publicly available.