Academics ‘lose a week a year’ to formatting journal papers

Most academics will be familiar with the laborious task of formatting their research articles to meet the requirements of peer-reviewed journals – multiple times over in the case of papers that are rejected by one periodical before finding a home elsewhere.

Now a study has attempted for the first time to quantify the cost of this painstaking activity, and it doesn’t appear to come cheap, either in terms of time or money.

Drawing on responses to an online poll from 458 researchers in 41 countries, a paper published in Plos One claims that scientists lose an average of 52 hours a year to formatting manuscripts – the equivalent of about one working week – either before submission to peer-reviewed titles or after they have been accepted.

That figure is based on results suggesting that respondents formatted an average of four papers a year – each of which took an estimated 14 hours to process, having typically been submitted to two publications before being accepted. Tasks involved in formatting included altering figures, tables, supplementary files and references to meet journals’ requirements.

With the median annual income of respondents falling between $61,000 and $80,999 (£49,460 and £65,675), the wage costs for each manuscript were estimated at $477 – or $1,908 per researcher each year, according to the paper.

It recommends the “elimination of strict [scientific] formatting guidelines, at least prior to [a paper’s] acceptance” to “alleviate [an] unnecessary burden on scientists”.

Four out of five scientific papers are rejected at least once before publication, according to recent research.

The authors of the latest paper – who are based at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and the University of Prince Edward Island, both in Canada – say that repeatedly formatting papers is often regarded as one of the most frustrating and time-consuming tasks in academia.

Allana LeBlanc, the study’s lead author, told Times Higher Education that the investigation was inspired by a “particularly onerous systematic review” of a previous paper that led to changes to more than 200 references.

“We joked often about how frustrating formatting references, tables, font size and headings was, and how incredible it was that this duty fell to the authors,” she said.

Dr LeBlanc acknowledged that the self-reporting nature of the poll – promoted on Twitter and completed mainly by those in health sciences – meant that the $1,908 annual cost figure could not be regarded as definitive.

However, the “problem is clear”, she added. ”Formatting to random standards set by various journals has no impact on the scientific value of the work; it just costs scientists both time and money,” she said. “Given the scarcity of grant funds in academia, there needs to be a change in role whereby the publishers take on some of this burden themselves.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com