From Laboratory to Scientific Literature

This study documents the course of submission of a group of biomedical research papers to peer-reviewed journals and characterizes their quality through citation analysis for published papers and through a typology of originality for those papers that were never accepted. Of fifty-nine papers, 47 percent (n = 28) were accepted by the first journal to which they were submitted, 25 percent (n = 15) by the second, and 7 percent (n = 6) by the third to sixth journal. For the first five years of publication, the average citation rate per year was 1.5, and 43 percent had more than 1 citation per year. Fifteen papers (25 percent) were never accepted. Typologic analysis of five of these papers suggests some standards by which it may be possible to characterize scientific originality.