In article <jcherwon.30.0016BD3D at dres.dnd.ca> jcherwon at dres.dnd.ca (John Cherwonogrodzky) writes:
>Dear Colleagues:
> I've had 4 excellent summer students and I feel deeply obligated in
>having their research published to promote their budding careers. For 2, even
>though I'm not an immunologist, as the work involved methods in
>immunology, I naturally sent these to the J. Immunol. Methods. These were
>promptly rejected and so could you give alternative journals I could try?
> The first paper was worth a try, but I have to admit was perhaps too
>preliminary. It showed that a bacteriophage WB1 could be used to replace
>antibodies in the detection of Brucella (animal care groups would love this).
>When my institute, DRES, does get its Level 3 containment, I should expand the
>research to include a battery of enzyme conjugated bacteriophages to detect
>Brucella, anthrax, plague and cholera and try to improve my conjugation
>techniques. So I can take the criticism that scientists want refined results
>rather than preliminary findings.
> For the second, (I don't think I received a copy of reviewers' comments)
>that should have done well but didn't. The paper used GammaBind G to improve
>ELISAs 100-fold, increased sensitivity to 0.1 nanogram amounts, and has
>potential for shortening times for ELISAs.
>
I have no idea where you could publish the first paper. It's not basic research
and as it stands andthe technique wouldn't be of much use for the majority
of immunology labs. I don't often look at J. Immunol. Methods, but when I do,
it seems that most of the methods have a broader application that could be
used by lots of basic research labs for diverse projects. I'm not saying that
your technique has no clinical applications, but few immunology journals
deal much with novel methods of clinical testing at all and I'd imagine that
the odds are even worse when you're dealing with an animal pathogen. Perhaps
there's a veterinary or animal science journal that would find your manuscript
appropriate? There must be journals that deal primarily with livestock pathogen
testing that would find your test for Brucella of great importance (there
are certainly enough schools of agriculture to warrant something like this).
However, you might give the journal, "Biotechniques" a try for the second one.
If the editors are convinced, this technique would have much broader
applications since ELISAS are common and used by a large percentage of
labs, including those doing basic reserach. An improvement in sensitivity
of this assay would be a significant contribution. It doesn't really sound
like the sort of thing I would have expected to find in J. Immunol. Methods
though. Usually, these articles give gross detail in techniques that were
used in other basic research papers previously published by the same authors.
Sometimes the strategy is quite interesting, but not everyone saw it the first
time around because the actual topic of the paper itself wasn't of broad
interest and you'd never have even read the paper in the first place because
basic research articles tend not to dwell on techniques themselves (unless
it's something involving gene therapy, transgenic and gene knockout
techniques, etc) in the titles or abstracts. Also, as almost any biologist
knows, it's rare to get a published technique to work right the first few
times just from reading the original paper. In theory, the materials and
methods section should give you enough information to be able to reproduce
the technique without additional information. In practice, it's much better
to call the authors first for potential pitfalls, which are rarely covered in
much (if any) detail :) J.Immunol. Methods is a great place to provide a lot
of this kind of information.
Finally, I could be incorrect but I think that J. Immunol. Methods is one
of those journals that invites contributors (kind of like review series)
I don't think I've ever known anyone who's written a section for it without
being asked to by the powers that be, but that could just be a coincidence
and might not reflect the majority of the articles found there.
> If you could offer suggestions for other journals to try, I would
>appreciate it. Again, I owe my students for at least trying.
> Thanks for your help...John Cherwonogrodzky
Good Luck,
Stacy
