Dear Antonio. You have pointed out towards a very much existing issue in academic publishing. You will get published if either your paper is exceptionally good or if you are known to the editors/reviewers. One feels really unlucky sometimes that he/she is not born in technologically advanced countries once the papers are merely rejected due to the name of a third world country at the top. Some very good works are rejected coz the authors do not know good English or have not presented well. On the other hand, some very ordinary work is accepted coz the author is native speaker. Unfortunate!! isnt it ?

However, the solution is to let people write in mother languages without any link to his/her name or region and some service shall translate those to English or the language of Journal.

Dear Antonio. You have pointed out towards a very much existing issue in academic publishing. You will get published if either your paper is exceptionally good or if you are known to the editors/reviewers. One feels really unlucky sometimes that he/she is not born in technologically advanced countries once the papers are merely rejected due to the name of a third world country at the top. Some very good works are rejected coz the authors do not know good English or have not presented well. On the other hand, some very ordinary work is accepted coz the author is native speaker. Unfortunate!! isnt it ?

However, the solution is to let people write in mother languages without any link to his/her name or region and some service shall translate those to English or the language of Journal.

Please consider not to publish in closed journals, which charge your library exorbitant fees to let you have a look at their 'highly respected' contents. Instead publish in Open Access journals with reputation, but beware of predatory ones, of course. Please view

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_submitting_a_paper_for_open_access_journal_a_good_idea

and do not get frustrated but follow the positive comments in this thread

https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_far_are_scientists_willing_to_go_to_publish_their_rejected_articles_or_scientific_reviews

You should have good relationship with the editor, be from the institutes in which he has friends, know people that he knows, write things in which he is interested in, not be associated with people he does not like, etc. The last things is the quality of your paper.

The same applies for getting an Academic job, especially in "closed" countries such as in the netherlands, the last thing that counts is the quality of your CV and publications.

@ Imran Shafi, of course your ethnic, national and religious backgrounds do matter, the same as in job applications. Sad but true!

Dear Antonio

If the author doesn't have excellent relationship with the editorial board and if you are of a developing country, its not important the quality of your paper. Its a private group.

If the situation is true, may be some authors will choose open access journals in spite of the IF

If I said the above concerns are not true then I am lying.

I also like to point out that bad English writing that is too hard for reviewers to understand will definitely lead to rejection. However, there are occasions that the manuscript have been revised by several American born coauthors (all of them have at least 40 papers published in high IF journals) but still rejected for poor English. Try to figure it.

In my point of view, personal relationship to key person in journal does not count alot for acceptance.

In my opinion, it is the reputation one has in a given field that is covered by the Journal that tends to make the playing field tilt towards one. Secondly, reviewers who provide expert advice are also influenced by the reputation of the corresponding author. Thirdly, the subject matter if very new, tends to be more readily accepted as a consequence of the reputation of the corresponding author. Bottom line: it is the reputation that has taken years to build which favours acceptance of a submitted study by a given author. Do friends play a part? They probably do for some. But overall it is the bottom line that remains constant; namely, reputation.

@ Leonard: :Secondly, reviewers who provide expert advice are also influenced by the reputation of the corresponding author. ". But they were supposed to be anonymous to each other. I know in practice they are not. It is easy to find out who are authors and who are reviewers. But still regardless of the reviews, it is the editor in chief who decides what to be published and what not!

I think that everybody gives special attention to their friends and families and finds difficult to resist if they are nagging. There are many scandals worldwide where it turned out that decision makers were biased and violated procedures that should grant equality, even in audited environments or public visibility. So I believe even in controlled and transparent environments equality is only imperfectly achieved.

AFAIK top journals are neither audited for their procedures nor has the public insight how they operate. Also once in a while I see papers I find weak in otherwise strong journals and suspect that connections may have lead to their acceptances. So I believe cronyism does happen in top journals, too.

I think the title question was phrased correctly as it asked "How much do personal relationships ... count?" rather than asking if they count at all.

In this sense I disagree with the first half of Alberto Tagliafico's comment above where he questioned the existence of cronyism in top journals, but I agree with the second half: open access or other journals competing for fame may be attractive for authors of good manuscripts without personal relationships.

Whatever the extent of these unfair practices is, I find it valuable to brainstorm methods how to make the publishing institutions as fair as possible.

That's why we have so much papers but very few results in terms of beneficial outcome for the common.

I don't know how much personal relationships count, but I suggest a method how to quantify it.

Take a representative sample of scholarly articles. Remove author and affiliation information, analyse them and assign quality scores to them. Using relationship networks derived from co-authorship measure the social distance of the authors from the editorial board of the journal. Analyse the nature and strength of association between the quality and social distance. If lower quality is associated with a closer social connection that suggests cronyism.

Dear Babak, In theory yes. But in practice, the paper itself points out the corresponding author since his/her prior work is preferentially cited, especially if it is in a new field.

I second Leonard. It is so unfair but in competitive scientific research "fairness" is what we all hope for.

@ Henk Smid: Honest answer by a Dutch man. Also it applies to job applications.

Above all it is not considered scandal in Holland. There is nowadays a good excuse in the Netherlands in order to circumvent allegations of cronyism and discrimination, they say that the applicant does not fit to our working environment!

I will like to look at the issue from the point of view of 'closeness of opinions' of the major contributors and editors of the top ranking journals. My experience is that a given top journal (at least in the field of management) subscribe to a range of acceptable world views. So a manuscript (which must be a top end research to begin with) should basically conform to such worldview and then by virtue of being a top end research, will have higher chance of getting published. Otherwise, it will be considered too econoclastic for the readership of that journal. It largely depends on the editor how much he/she can allow a good quality research but based on entirely different set of assumption to go review to publication. Other than this, given that reputed journals have gone for online submission and online review, my experience is the review process is fairly apersonal in top journals.

Why bother publishing in a journal at all? Some refreshing thoughts about that here

http://research.iheartanthony.com/2012/02/23/why-bother-publishing-in-a-journal-2/

Personal relations with the editorial board will increase the chances to publish the paper. Persistence its very important for authors. In Brazil its very important the phrase: You must be king's friend !

My old friend Lenny Ornstein once said to me many decades ago: "If it ain't published it has not been done. And if it has not been cited, it was never done." The bottom line "CITATIONS X Total Number of papers in given field = reputation. Here "the boys are separated from the men." And this is all that there is with respect to the level of a publishing field. "Ya gotta put in da time if ya wanna be able to publish at will." And you also must remember that it takes years to build up a reputation that can be lost with the publication of a poor study or a fraudulent one that contains your name. Look up the scandals of biomedical research of the 1970's and 80's and you will see the "bodies" of some extremely capable scientists who lent their names to one or a series of studies that were fraudulent and resulted in disgrace and loss of prominent position. Assuming that the reputation earned is "dear" to a given scientist, a Journal favours the well known with confidence. And it pays off in the short and long run with increased number of readers.

If the journal is truly blind review then personal relations may get you sent to reviewers but they do not insure that you will get published. One key to being published is to do an analysis of the journal, the current editorial direction, and the editorial board. Analyzing the focus of the journal, what i publishes, and how the reviews are undertaken is critical.

Having edited top ranked journals in a range of literacy and education research fields,my colleagues and I often received articles that did not fit the editorial directions, nor did they know the fields whose work was being published. Reviewing for a journal before submitting will help you understand the process as will attending editorial sessions at national and international meetings.

My advisor told me to write a good paper. I thought I had but when I submitted it for publication, I found out what they expected. What counts as a good paper depends on what each field framing a journal expects. You can always query the editor to explore in advance if your article is one that fits with them. Also if you receive a revise and resubmit to a top journal, you want to resubmit. It often takes 3 revisions to be published. When you resubmit, you also want to write to the editors and tell them how you responded to the editors suggestions for revisions and the issues raised by reviewers. You do not need to agree with the reviewer but you do need to address the issue and make transparent your logic, analysis, and basis for warranting claims. You may want to visit the American Educational Research Association site and see two sets of standards-- Standards for Reporting Empirical Social Science Research in AERA Journals and Standards for Reporting Humanities-oriented Research in AERA Journals. The core of these standards is the concept of transparency. http://www.aera.net Go to publications and to the Standards.

My unscientific impression (after 30+ years of observation) is that this is a problem more for *lower* ranked journals than for top-ranked journals (in economics and computer science, the fields in which I engage -- in CS this goes for peer-refereed conferences too).

The top ranked places are edited by the best scholars, and they really seem to care about getting the very best ideas and results out there. They also generally use double-blind refereeing. And they are able to call on higher quality referees.

The lower quality journals -- sometimes, not all of them of course -- tend to act more like clubs, with a smaller audience of people talking to each other and mutually supporting each other's work, which leads, I believe, to more bias in the selection process.

@Jeffrey MacKie-Mason. Are you talking about the lower quality journals in the same discipline or are you saying that computer science or economics are higher disciplines. I see from your answer that you meant the second. I do not agree with this statement. However, I am insider in those disciplines which you called "lower. in these disciplines almost all journals act the same; no matter its IF etc. a good relationship with the editing team, as well as the reputation of your university, and your ethnic, national, and religious affiliation, your name, your point of views (especially in the political sciences) determine the success.

@Babak Rezvani: No! Not what I was saying at all. I said lower and higher ranked *journals*, not disciplines. I can see there might be some ambiguity with my parenthetical: I meant it to be parsed "lower vs top-ranked journals within a discipline", where I'm speaking knowledgeably only about the disciplines I know.

Sorry for any confusion: I definitely was not disparaging other disciplines.

I think that personal connections can help you get accepted, but only if 1.) the journal is basicly a one-man operation (and that criterium rules out most of the respected/high quality journals), 2.) it is a journal of a learned society where you are well-connected or hold a key position 3.) you know exactly that person from the editorial board who will manage the peer review process of your manuscript (that way you can get 'friendly' reviewers). Other than that, i do not think that personal relations matters, at least not in an extent that may be critical.