Hello colleagues, I was wondering if I could ask for general advice or guidance on something?
I tried to submit a paper recently, but it got rejected on this occasion. Essentially, we did a microarray analysis on bone tissues from control and diseased animals, and followed up with some qPCR. The reason we did the microarray in the first place was because we had virtually no idea what genes/pathways/biomarkers were affected in our animal model, so the microarray primarily served as a screening/discovery tool. However, the paper was written with a particular hypothesis and focused on a small number of genes that qPCR showed to be affected.
Based on the feedback from the reviewers, it sounds like they weren't convinced by the hypothesis, and this is one of the main reasons why it was rejected. One reviewer even suggested that the paper could be presented as a screening study that indicates interesting data.
The reason I am here today is because I wanted to ask the community if there are any journals out there that accept screening/discovery papers? That is, papers that maybe don't have a particular hypothesis, but rather show the results of an untargeted analysis and discuss indications that the data offers? I know that untargeted metabolomics papers can be published without targeted LC/MS metabolite analysis, so that they rather show the different pathways and classes of metabolites affected rather than focussing on specific metabolites. I was wondering if this is also possible for microarray experiments, and which journals would be appropriate for this purpose?
Any help that can be given will be massively appreciated, and many thanks in advance to everyone.
Hi Adam
There is journal that fits your research outcomes: BMC Research Notes.
They publish non-significant results or even experiments with low sample size.
Good luck
Hi Adam,
I see a good fit with journals from Frontiers, and the MDPI as two pblishers who have 1000s of journals and eventually everything boils down to $$$ and eventual acceptance, no matter how the peer-review goes and not in a negative way, but weaker studies (low power, no hypothesis etc) or studies with weaker hypothesis etc get through their journals and 100s of their so called "Special Issues".
Also, leaving them on a preprint server such as OSF Preprints or bioRxiv can help you get some feedback fro the research community esp. if you are willing to implement them and make a robust paper.
PeerJ and PLoS One, and Scientific Reports are other journals who do only care for correctness of a study and do not look for novelty etc.
Hope it helps.
Thanks again,
Biswa
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