Short and Sweet

Authors have agreed for hundreds of years that it takes work to say something in an economical way. Both Blaise Pascal and Mark Twain are credited with apologizing for writing long letters because they did not have the time to write a shorter one. William Shakespeare, in the most economical phrasing of all, simply said in Hamlet, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” This issue comes up as well in editing a journal, especially one like Annals of Neurology, which has a contract with our publisher that limits the number of pages. We are restricted to 168 pages per issue of scientific content, and this forces us to accept for publication only as many papers as we can fit within those confines. Our acceptance rate, which is <10% of submitted manuscripts, is based on this necessity. If our major limitation is page space, then it becomes necessary to consider the length of each paper as a factor in determining how many manuscripts we can accept. The San Francisco editors (Steve Hauser and colleagues) used strict word limits (3,500 words for a Research Article, for example). They compensated for this limit by permitting authors to place much of the Methods and figures, and even some Results, into Supplementary Materials. This is a popular solution used by many journals that are pressed for page space. But this approach struck the current, Boston-based crew of editors as removing too much of the manuscript into the supplementary files, which we felt were seldom evaluated critically either by reviewers or readers of the journal. To remedy this, we did away with supplementary files (except for long, bulky tables or videos) and asked authors to include all of the relevant Methods and Results in the body of the main manuscript. We put word limits on only the Introduction (500 words) and Discussion (1,500 words). Our efforts had a rather predictable result; the body of the manuscripts we received began to balloon, with many exceeding 5,000 words and some >7,000 words. Other papers had 10 or more figures, often with long figure legends as well. The result was that some papers in Annals were running to 15 to 20 printed pages. We responded by putting the Methods section into a smaller font, and have again asked the publisher to rework the print format so that we can waste less white space on the title page of our papers, and make the font of the Methods section even smaller (for those of us over 40 who want to read the details, you can still make the print larger in the PDF version of the paper). But these tactics can only reduce the length of papers marginally, and so the Editors in February posted new word limits for papers in Annals of Neurology, which we intend to stick to in the future. The current Author Guidelines on our website, for example, limit a Research Article to 5,000 words, with 8 figures and 50 references. This is still rather generous, but we simply cannot afford to print papers that are longer than this, because it means we will not be publishing other papers at all. If you are planning to prepare a paper for Annals, we invite you to visit our website, and please stick to the new guidelines. (Of course, we are grateful to accept papers that are shorter than these limits. However, in no case will we review papers that exceed them.) Although these word limits may seem arbitrary, they are necessary for us to make Annals accessible for as many prospective authors as we can. But do these limits do justice to the science we are presenting? I would argue that, if authors spend a few hours paring down their text to meet our word limits, the quality of the papers will actually improve. As an author myself, I have gone through the process of cutting down the number of words in a paper to meet the arbitrary word limits of other journals. In almost every case, the paper that has emerged is actually better written, as I have been forced to say things more economically, to eliminate duplications and digressions, and generally to focus the work more tightly on the main issues and conclusions. In those exercises I have come to recognize what Shakespeare, Pascal, and Twain, each writing in a different era and for a different audience, all agreed upon. It takes more effort to say something more economically, but in the end, it is worth it.