Wasim Maziak has concerns about the small number of papers published in the journal from less developed nations (LDCs) and urges that we send more LDC papers out for review and not reject them without review. The editors share his wish to see more papers in the journal from LDCs, but there are two problems. First, we don’t get very many submissions from LDCs, and second, like those submitted from authors in wealthy nations, we receive many papers which we reject for a variety of reasons that I summarized in my editorial.

The most common reason we reject papers without review is that they are describe very local populations and don’t take readers into any original areas that have obvious implications for others. A typical such paper might be a smoking prevalence or knowledge/attitudes/correlates of smoking study undertaken on the staff of a hospital, a group of medical students from one university or a population sample. We reject such papers all the time no matter where they come from, but unfortunately they mostly come from LDCs.

Often these papers are well done, but they rarely say anything different other than reporting on another population in another place. Dr Maziak suggests that such papers “are likely to have implications on a wide sphere of health and economic research, usually transcending the country in focus.” I’m sorry to say that they rarely do. If we were to run such papers, we would clog up the journal with them very quickly which would mean we would be able to publish less of the papers that our judgement is increasingly showing to be of relevance to others, give our upwardly spiraling impact factor.

We do not send them out for review because we do not want to waste reviewers’ valuable time if we have no interest in publishing such papers.

Journals are not the only place that such data can be published. Websites and WHO collections allow people who are interested in such studies to gain access to such data.

The table below shows the distribution of all submissions to the journal since January 1992. The data has been adjusted to take into account papers which have been submitted as part of specially commissioned supplements, and so the third column shows the acceptance rate by country of origin of corresponding author for all papers submitted for routine consideration by the journal. These data do not of course reflect papers which are still under review and they do not take account of papers written by authors registered in countries whose papers concern another country. This often happens in cases where an author from (say) Nigeria, is working in the USA or where there are multiple authors from different countries.

The great majority of our submissions come from researchers in wealthy nations, particularly the USA, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Scandanavian nations, and New Zealand. This undoubtedly reflects the extent of research support available in those nations and so the “health” of the research enterprise on tobacco control in those nations.

Interestingly, we have received 25 submissions from Turkey. Nearly all of these have been rejected as they were either very small, parochial studies (typically smoking prevalence in special, local populations) or had other problems.

All authors submit their paper with the hope that it will be published. The unavoidable fact of life about all (good) journals is that they receive far more papers than they can ever publish. So culling must occur. Rejection does not occur only on the basis of study quality. Competent but dull papers fare worse than competent but interesting papers. Papers that cause the editorial group to say "we already know this" do worse that those where we say "this is something new and interesting."

I reiterate that we would love to publish more papers from LDCs, but as Dr Maziak agrees, we should not do this at the expense of quality.

Country or region	Submissions	Acceptances	Adjusted acceptance rate
USA	364	150 (41.2)	28.6
Europe incl Turkey	135	22 (16.3)	16.3
Australia & New Zealand	119	85** (48.7)	37.8
Asia	89	22*** (24.7)	12.4
UK	78	24**** (30.8)	24.3
Canada	44	14 (31.8)	31.8
Middle East	19	0 (0)	0
Latin America	9	2 (22.2)	22.2
Africa	8	3 (37.5)	37.5
Total	865	322 (37.2)	25.4

Notes:
* includes 46 papers accepted for commissioned supplements
** includes 40 papers accepted for commissioned supplements
*** includes 11 papers accepted for commissioned supplements
***** includes 5 papers accepted for commissioned supplements

Simon Chapman Editor