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I don't understand your comment. Nothing I said requires someone to "study to be an actual scientist" nor did I emphasize an orthodox style. How did you infer that? For that matter, how do you define "actual scientist" any different from "average joe who makes a breakthrough discovery"? There is certainly a required style - a paper needs an abstract, it needs a body, and it needs a references section. This is because it fits into a larger system of use. People read the abstract to get a sense of if the paper is relevant to their interests. If so, then they might spend the money to get the rest of the paper, or spend the time needed to fully understand it. People use the references to get a better sense of the background required to understand the paper. Only people who fiercely believe they are exceptional (ie, not an average joe) might think they don't need to include this information. Another part of the orthodoxy is that it needs to be written in the language of the journal. Angewandte Chemie only accepts papers in German, so if you submit a paper in Malay then it's not going to be accepted no matter how good it is. It also needs to be relevant to the interests of the journal - even if it's in German, Angewandte Chemie won't publish a paper about low-energy neutrino detection. The "instructions to the author" describe these sorts of points. If that is too much orthodoxy for your hypothetical average joe, then joe will have a hard time doing anything, which makes joe decidedly not average. On the other hand, editors will usually bend over backwards to get a seriously ground-breaking piece published. They just have to be able to understand that it's 1) ground-breaking, 2) relevant, and 3) likely to be true. Joe's first step is to convince the editor of that. If no editor can be convinced, then it's unlikely that other, non-editors will be convinced. You mentioned "mis-formatting" as a possible hang-up. To start, this means you haven't read many papers, because I find mis-formattings all the time. Remember, editors in nearly all cases are working joes who volunteer their time. As the UNSW link points out "Even sending the [manuscript] back to you, unread, with a covering note saying "Read the Instructions to authors" takes time." - time that the editor would rather spend doing research. The problem is that editors get a lot of crank submissions and a lot of poorly done research. These are disproportionately poorly formatted. Editors are human, and if they see something that looks nothing like a scientific paper, it's much more likely to trigger the "crank" flag than to be seen as a breakthrough paper. There's a balance at work here. A novelist who just wrote the next Great American Novel, but wrote it using a leaky ball-point pen on tissue paper, making the result difficult to decipher, will find it harder to publish. Xkcd #483 points out that the probability of new words created by the author is inversely proportionally to the probability of the book being good. And so on, and so on, and so on. I think one of the points of confusion here is that "ground-breaking" is a very broad term, almost to the point of uselessness. Every single published scientific paper is supposed to break new ground. Some find a new sandbox, others a back yard, others an island, and a very few find a new continent. Without more information about your hypothetical case, it's impossible if this is something like "discovered antigravity" or "found a new intermediate of acetylene catalysis on the Platinum(100) surface", but odds are that it's not something like the first, so the requirement for convincing people that it's actually ground-breaking is higher. For the record, scientists are average joes in just about every measure, except that they can put some extra letters before or after their name. Don't get hung up by thinking they are special in any way. Also, editors have no clue on the background of a new author, and I've seen many papers where the author has no institutional affiliation, so it's not like they can tell if someone is/isn't a scientist. "By your words are ye known", to misquote Matthew. To directly quote George Lundberg, editor of JAMA, after publishing a paper which included Emily Rosa, a 9 year old, as co-author: "Age doesn't matter. It's good science that matters, and this is good science". |
The format is the message to some degree. Lazy editors help perpetuate this as you suggest.