Publishing works differently in every field

Conferences outrank journals in computer science. Mathematics has the lowest impact factors in science and it means nothing. Clinical trials must be registered before the first participant. 30 disciplines, and what actually differs between them.

Area StudiesArea studies sits between a discipline and a region, and reviewers usually come from one side or the other. The commonest rejection is not a flaw in the work but a mismatch: a historian’s paper read by political scientists, or the reverse.

ArtsArts research produces outputs that a journal article was not designed to carry. The question is usually not whether the work is good but how to document it so that a reader who was not present can assess it.

Behavioral SciencesBehavioural science changed its publishing norms faster than most fields after the replication debates. Preregistration, effect sizes and open materials are no longer unusual requests — in many journals they are entry requirements.

BioscienceBioscience papers are increasingly rejected for things that sit beside the result rather than in it: a missing accession number, an unvalidated antibody, an image that cannot survive screening.

Built EnvironmentBuilt environment research is mostly case-based, and the case is both its strength and the reason it gets rejected. One building, one site, one city is evidence; the paper has to say what it is evidence of.

Communication StudiesCommunication research is methodologically split — critical, qualitative and computational work sit in the same field but rarely in the same journals, and submitting to the wrong half is the most avoidable rejection in the discipline.

Computer ScienceComputer science is the one field where the top venues are conferences, not journals. Advice written for other disciplines actively misleads here, and so do assessment frameworks that only count journal articles.

Earth SciencesEarth science data is usually impossible to collect twice — a core, a flight line, a field season. That makes deposition and documentation central to how the field judges a paper, not an administrative afterthought.

Economics, Finance, Business & IndustryEconomics runs on a working-paper culture and the longest review times in the social sciences. Finance and management publish faster but ask harder questions about identification and endogeneity.

EducationEducation research is judged on two things at once: whether the study is sound, and whether anyone could act on it. Papers that satisfy only the first are the most common near-miss in the field.

Engineering & TechnologyEngineering reviewers ask one question before any other: compared to what? A method that works is not a result. A method that works better than the current best, measured the same way, is.

Environment & AgricultureAgricultural research has a constraint few other fields share: the experiment runs at the speed of the growing season. A design flaw costs a year, which is why the design stage deserves more attention here than almost anywhere.

Environment and SustainabilitySustainability research is interdisciplinary by construction, which creates its particular problem: the paper has reviewers from two fields and must satisfy both without being written for neither.

Food Science & TechnologyFood science papers are assessed on whether the measurement is defensible. A sensory result from an untrained panel, or a compositional figure from an unvalidated method, fails regardless of how interesting the finding is.

GeographyGeography is two disciplines sharing a name. Physical geography publishes like an environmental science; human geography publishes like a social science or a humanity. Choosing the wrong half of the field is the most common targeting error.

Global DevelopmentDevelopment research is scrutinised on how it was done as much as what it found. Who collected the data, who is on the author list, and who benefits are now questions reviewers ask explicitly.

Health and Social CareHealth and social care research sits between clinical medicine and social science, and inherits reporting expectations from both. Qualitative work here is held to standards as explicit as any trial.

HumanitiesThe humanities are measured with instruments built for the sciences, and the fit is poor. Understanding where the metrics break down is the difference between targeting sensibly and chasing a number that does not describe the field.

Information ScienceInformation science studies the publication system it publishes in, which makes it unusually strict about method transparency — the field knows exactly how a search can be constructed to produce a desired result.

Language & LiteratureLiterary scholarship and linguistics share a departmental home and almost nothing else about how they publish. One is argued from texts, the other from data, and the journals are entirely separate.

LawLegal publishing has a structure that exists nowhere else: in the United States the leading journals are edited by students, submitted to in bulk during set windows, and expect an offer-and-expedite process that looks nothing like peer review.

Mathematics, Statistics & Data ScienceMathematics has the slowest review and the lowest citation density of any major field, and both are normal. Judging a maths journal by the standards used in biomedicine produces a completely wrong picture.

Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing & Allied HealthClinical publishing is the most rule-bound of any field, and most of the rules are checkable before submission. Papers fail on them far more often than on the quality of the research.

Museum and Heritage StudiesHeritage scholarship is written largely by people who also run collections, and the field reads papers accordingly: it wants to know what you did, in a real institution, with real constraints.

Physical SciencesPhysics and chemistry have the most established preprint culture in science and the most explicit data-deposition requirements. Both are old enough that reviewers treat them as baseline rather than best practice.

Politics & International RelationsPolitical science is split between quantitative work with replication requirements and qualitative work with difficult field ethics, and the journals that serve them have different rules about almost everything.

Social SciencesThis page covers the social sciences broadly — sociology, social policy, anthropology and the interdisciplinary work between them. Where behavioural science is organised around experiments, this half of the field is organised around theory and context.

Sports and LeisureSport research runs from physiology to sociology, and its hardest methodological problem is specific: the better your athletes, the fewer of them there are.

Tourism, Hospitality and EventsTourism and hospitality publishes heavily from surveys, which is why its reviewers have become unusually strict about survey quality. The methodological objections in this field are predictable, which makes them preventable.

Urban StudiesUrban research is dominated by the single-city study, and dominated by the objection that follows it. Making one city say something about cities is the core craft problem of the field.

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