I saw this great tweet (fairly) recently:
I thought this was such a great explanation of when to submit your paper.
It reminded me of a diagram that I sketched out when talking to a student in my lab about a paper we were writing. I was trying to explain why we don’t exaggerate our findings. And conversely why we don’t undersell our results either. I replotted it below:
Getting out to review is a major hurdle to publishing a paper. Therefore, convincing the Editor that you have found out something amazing is the first task. This is counterbalanced by peer review, which scrutinises the claims made in a paper for their experimental support. So, exaggerated claims might get you over the first hurdle, but it will give you problems during peer review (and afterwards if the paper makes it to print). Conversely, underselling or not interpreting all your data fully is a different problem. It’s unlikely to impress the Editor as it can make your paper seem “too specialised”, although if it made it to the hands of your peers they would probably like it! Obviously at either end of the spectrum no-one likes a dull/boring/incremental paper and everyone can smell a rat if the claims are completely overblown, e.g. genome sequence of Sasquatch.
So this is why we try to interpret our results fully but are careful not to exaggerate our claims. It might not get us out to review every time, but at least we can sleep at night.
I don’t know if this is a fair representation. Certainly depending on the journal the scale of the y-axis needs to change!
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The post title is taken from “Middle of the Road” by Teenage Fanclub a B-side from their single “I Don’t Want Control of You”.