Bela Fishbeyn, MS and David Magnus, PhD

Our publishers recently changed how they present journal metrics on Taylor & Francis Online. Each journal in their portfolio now features a new metrics tab on every journals’ home page that includes information about citation metrics, usage (downloads), speed (average days from submission to first decision, average days from acceptance to online publication, etc), and acceptance rate. 

The information was added in the hopes of empowering researchers and authors to make informed decisions by providing a broader range of metrics and clear information for their use. That said, they were only able to list a single number for AJOB’s acceptance rate – 33% – which lumps all of our article types together (target articles, OPCs, editorials, book reviews, etc). 

We do not want to mislead potential AJOB authors with this high acceptance rate, especially because we understand that the article types of greatest interest are submitting are target articles. To avoid further confusion, we’d like to provide a more detailed breakdown of our 2020 acceptance rate that distinguishes between target articles and OPCs. 

Our 2020 acceptance rate for Target Articles was 14% while our acceptance rate for OPCs was about 35%. It’s difficult to provide an exact breakdown of our acceptance rate for OPCs, editorials, case submissions, and book reviews because many of these are invited and solicited directly by our editors.

We hope these more detailed statistics help authors make informed choices prior to submitting their articles of whatever type. If you have any questions about this, feel free to email us at editor@bioethics.net.