{Opinions expressed here are strictly mine and not endorsed by anybody or any organisation}
The structure of a good (letter) manuscript
A typical AE (Associate Editor) at JACS gets to decide on ~400 manuscripts a year. That’s more than one every day including weekends and holidays. That’s obviously a lot and, since about 20% of manuscripts make it to publication in the journal, a selection has to be made even before manuscripts are sent off for review (or not). Unlike some other chemistry journals, the AEs are not full-time editors but are academics who have to teach, do admin, write proposals, and write manuscripts themselves (and get them occasionally rejected like everybody else). It is therefore of paramount importance that authors get to the point quickly and make it obvious why the work is suitable for publication in JACS (or a similar high impact journal). This can be done with the manuscript itself and with an appropriate cover letter. Here, I will address what I think is the structure of a good manuscript for JACS. I’ll discuss the importance (or lack thereof) of a cover letter some other time.
JACS, the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society and the world's preeminent journal in all of chemistry and interfacing areas of science, publishes “Communications” and “Articles”. Communications are restricted in length whereas Articles formally are not. However, most papers in JACS (except perhaps “Perspectives”) are quite short as it is for all intends and purposes a letter journal for rapid publication of exciting results of interest to the wide chemical community. Therefore, the basic structure of a typical JACS paper is
- abstract
- introduction
- results
- conclusion
with typically 3 or maybe a few more figures.
I can’t speak for others but I read the abstract, the introduction, scan the results (especially the figures and captions), and read the conclusion. I am looking for (i) an interesting chemistry problem, that is (ii) investigated in a novel way, leading to (iii) an interesting general conclusion, that (iv) has impact on the wider chemical community.
The first and most important opportunity to convince an AE that the manuscript is worthy of consideration is the abstract. The journal Nature requires a very specific style (I put the Nature abstract requirement on my website) and I see a lot of Nature-style abstracts in manuscripts submitted to JACS. That’s fine but there is no need to be quite this prescriptive but a good abstract definitely has the following parts:
- set the stage by explaining what others have done and what the remaining scientific problem is
- say what you have done and what new conclusions you have reached
- finally explain how your results will impact the wider scientific community
Some abstracts don’t set the stage well in the abstract but make up for it in the introduction, which is OK, I guess. Some abstracts don’t explain the impact well but make up for it in the conclusion, which is also OK, I guess. Which brings us to the conclusion: clearly explain what impact your results will have on the wider scientific community. There is no point in putting these essential elements in a cover latter but not in the manuscript. There is also no point in writing a really narrowly focussed manuscript and then in the very last sentence say something like “and this will have great impact on X”, when X was never mentioned before.
So that’s it, quite straightforward in principle...
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