Teplitskiy and his colleagues worked with data provided by IOP Publishing (IOPP), a company based in Bristol, UK, that publishes more than 90 English-language journals and is owned by the Institute of Physics. They examined around 203,000 manuscripts that were submitted to 62 of IOPP’s physical-sciences journals between 2018 and 2022. Some 62% were rejected.

The researchers scoured a bibliometric database to see whether the same (or similar) work was subsequently published elsewhere. They then sorted these publications by the geographical region of the corresponding author — the researcher who is usually in charge of a study’s publication process — and compared the outcomes for authors from the West (which they define as North America, Europe and Oceania) with those from the rest of the world.

The analysis showed that corresponding authors from Western countries are 5.7% more likely to publish a manuscript after rejection than those from other regions. In a process that often takes up to 300 days, they did so 23 days faster, on average. These authors also revised the abstract of their manuscript — a proxy for the overall paper — 5.9% less often, as defined by a computational ‘edit distance’ metric. And, ultimately, they published in journals with 0.8% higher impact factors.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02142-w