'What's the f-ing deal with journal formatting requirements?'

Yesterday, I completed a follow-up study on this important new research stream. Here's the new study's abstract and introduction:

Abstract

Many researchers wonder: what's the f-ing deal with journal formatting requirements? This is a common query. Journal formatting requirements are pretty weird. I mean, they require you to format your paper according to the journal's style even though there's a 90% chance your paper will be rejected and you’ll have to send your paper to another journal. To investigate this issue further, I went to submit a paper and looked several journals' author guidelines. They were weird! In conclusion, we may never know the f-ing deal with journal formatting requirements, but further study is warranted.

Introduction

Journal formatting requirements are very strange. Some researchers are like "whoa they actually require you to format your submission according to the journal's preferred style, what's the f-ing deal with that?" This sentiment is widely shared by researchers across institutions and backgrounds. Figuring our the f-ing deal with journal formatting requirements is thus of the utmost importance. It is now widely appreciated that the majority of journal formatting requirements are weird. [1] In journals with highly non-standard formatting requirements that emphasize the important of all submissions conforming to them, we need to understand what is going on with them. In journals with formatting guidelines that don't require new submissions to follow them, what are they even doing, and they do all sorts of weird stuff [4] (but see [5]). Despite these insights, the relative weirdness of journal formatting requirements and what the f is going on with them is yet untested [6-9].

I set out to test these hypotheses by observing several journals' author guidelines. Multiple journals endemic to the United States, Europe, and Australasia had moderately demanding journal formatting requirements (requiring 56% reformatting on average [10]). US journals regularly require Chicago style, whereas European journals routinely require APA (!) style and Australasia MLA style. I looked at these guidelines and how strongly they emphasized the importance that new submissions conform to them. I then verified these requirements upon attempting a new submission, whereupon 100% of the time I was required to check a box indicating that my paper conformed to the author guidelines. I predicted that these requirements would be pretty wild, looked really close at them, squinting and everything, to try and figure what their f-ing deal was. Study results are displayed in figure 1.

Comments

[Fool]

This is your belated April fools joke?! No?

[Marcus Arvan]

Yeah I forgot to post one this year, and the bird paper presented a belated opportunity too good to pass up! ;)

[Amanda]

I never formate my paper according to the journal guidelines before acceptance. I never once had a paper rejected or not sent out because of that (at least not, as far as I know.) It is only after a paper is accepted that I do that.

[Marcus Arvan]

Amanda: right, so what is the f-ing deal with them? Why are they even a thing and why do you always have to check a box (lying) that your paper conforms to them? ;)

[Amanda]

Do you have to check a box? Hmmm.. I've never noticed that.

And eh, they are just one of many, many, BS aspects with the entire journal process, alongside the BS commitment to blind review, to turning papers back in a timely manner, with stated word limits that are completely ignored with almost every published paper, etc. haha yes, I can't hold back my cynicism here!

[Neil Levy]

The AJP doesn't have format requirements for submission. That seems to me to be the right policy: I'm happy (well, happy enough) to put the paper in your stupid format when you've accepted it.

Amanda: I have had papers sent back because they weren't properly formatted on three or four occasions. It's never the editors: it's editorial staff who process the paper before the editors get to see it. In one case, the paper was sent back to me three times before I managed to get it right to their satisfaction. I now avoid those journals.

[Marcus Arvan]

Neil: yeah, I had it happen to me too just a few weeks ago—and the journal had a *really* idiosyncratic reference formatting system that took me around 4 hours to do, and I still mucked it up after the managing editor sent it back to me.

[Amanda]

Interesting Neil, maybe I've just been lucky. But if that happened, I would take your route too!

[Remco Heesen]

Anecdotally I've heard that this is one respect in which philosophy journals behave relatively well compared to journals in other fields. That is, most philosophy journals don't make you jump through formatting hoops unless and until your paper is accepted. Some state this policy explicitly, e.g., the Journal of Philosophy has this in its author guidelines: "The editors are willing to read and evaluate a manuscript that does not meet these seven guidelines, provided the author agrees to meet them before submitting a final manuscript."

Whereas (I've heard) in other fields it is fairly common to have to meet formatting requirements on initial submission.

[Nick]

It happened to me recently, and the email requesting revisions came from the editor. It had taken them four weeks before requesting the changes before sending the paper out to an associate editor. That's just four wasted four weeks. How frustrating.