The truth about getting published in science
With submissions at an all-time high, it’s never been harder to get published in influential scientific journals. ‘Science’ and ‘Science Advances’, two leading journals published by The American Association for the Advancement of Science – the world’s largest general science association – received over 50 000 submissions in 2025(opens in new window). So who gets published in a top-tier journal, anyway? A research team at the University of Vermont (UVM) and University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) investigated the review process and came up with an answer. An author’s institution and group size exert much more influence on acceptance rates than almost any other factor, including gender. The findings were published in ‘Science Advances’(opens in new window).
Publish or perish
The researchers examined five years of submission data for the two journals. The journals’ editors provided deidentified data on over 110 000 articles submitted to the publications system for review between 2015 and 2020 for them to build an anonymised dataset and determine patterns within. They found that scientists with specific characteristics had an easier time getting published in ‘Science’, which accepted about 6 % of submissions during the five-year period while ‘Science Advances’ accepted around 10.5 %. Papers by authors from top-ranked institutions had an 11.6 % acceptance rate, compared to 3.4 % for those from the lowest-ranked ones. “This is really a first look at this process that was previously opaque,” commented co-lead author Sam Zhang, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at UVM, in a news item(opens in new window). “With the rise of AI slop and the ability to mass produce junk science, the role of established gatekeepers like these elite journals becomes more important as these processes get put under strain.” The team also found that research topic, country of origin and gender also affected acceptance rates. Research on viruses, RNA immune response and infection achieved the highest success rates. In contrast, politics, economics, gender and societal issues involving COVID-19 experienced the lowest. Papers from teams consisting of 10 or more authors were accepted at three times the rate of smaller teams (up to five). While there was a gender gap in acceptance rates, it was considerably smaller than the disparities driven by status, team size or research topic. Papers written for the two journals by women had a slightly lower acceptance rate of 5.3 %, compared to 6.4 % for men.
The hidden gatekeeping process
“Peer review by scientific experts remains the gold standard for critically assessing whether new scientific work meets or surpasses high standards for scientific discovery,” stated corresponding author Aaron Clauset, professor of computer science at CU Boulder. “Our new anonymised data set … offers a first ever look at how elite peer review works.” The researchers found that editors screened out and rejected roughly 80 % of submissions to ‘Science’ and more than 70 % of submissions to ‘Science Advances’ before sending them for peer review. “The current evidence suggests, overall, these journals seem to be doing pretty well at just treating the science as the science. But this is not a totally clean bill of health,” concluded Clauset in a news release(opens in new window). “In the current environment where the integrity of science is being attacked in bad faith, we need to be thinking about whether the processes at these journals live up to the ideals the scientific community has set for them.”
