Why are there still page number restrictions for journal papers even though physical printing plays almost no role anymore?
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2This question is similar to: Why do so many publishing venues limit the length of paper submissions?. If you believe it’s different, please edit the question, make it clear how it’s different and/or how the answers on that question are not helpful for your problem. I understand it's been over eight years since it was posted, but the motivations don't appear to have changed much.– AnyonCommented Jul 3 at 12:28
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4 Answers
These rules encourage conciseness.
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Right. My favorite example of concise math writing (allegedly, due to page limitations) is by Pierre Fermat: "It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain." Commented Jul 3 at 15:06
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@MoisheKohan That's not concise. That's trolling. Or taking shortcuts that fail, but I prefer the "trolling" interpretation. Commented Jul 3 at 18:20
At least four reasons:
Many journals do still publish print versions.
Longer papers can take longer for editors and referees to read them. (I think this is a mistake in some respects. I'm in pure math, and the push for a very concise way of writing papers often makes them harder to read. Papers which have more length but use that length to explain what they are doing are great.)
Longer papers may be seen as less likely to be read and built upon which means they are less likely to be cited.
Tradition. Honestly, as much as academia is supposed to be about pushing the forefronts of human knowledge, we can be pretty conservative and this is likely the main reason.
In my experience (in pure math), these page limits usually only exist (unless you have an absurdly long paper) when there are two or more sister journals, one publishing short papers and one publishing longer ones.
answered Jul 3 at 11:48
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What do you mean by absurdly long? Generically (in math) the longer the paper, the harder to publish. There are many reasons for this, including difficulty in finding referees. Commented Jul 3 at 13:01
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@MoisheKohan I'm fairly sure that at most of the journals I've reviewed for, you don't find out the length of the paper until after you've agreed to review. Commented Jul 3 at 14:11
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1@DanielHatton: I refereed for well over 30 years, I always could see the entire paper before agreeing to referee. Ditto for serving in editorial capacity: potential referees could always see the entire paper before agreeing. But it might be different in some journals. Commented Jul 3 at 14:14
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@MoisheKohan I mean a lot of journals that don't have explicit page limits (so aren't what OP are asking about) might nevertheless refuse an 80-page manuscript because, as you say, they won't be able to find referees. There are journals that specialise in publishing papers of abnormal length, and they presumably have some strategy to deal with this, but I don't know what it is. Commented Jul 3 at 15:29
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I published 4 journal papers which are over 80 page long and wrote a 20 page appendix to another. All appeared in journals which also publish short papers. I once was asked to referee a 200 page long journal paper (I declined). I guess, the notion of "abnormal" is field-dependant (mine is math). Commented Jul 3 at 15:56
I had similar discussions with some colleagues that are EIC/executive/associate editors at major ACS, RSC, and Wiley journals over the years. Their take was that even though we are not limited by physical print, we still rely on all of the production editors, and their workload is already high. Another part is to discourage unnecessary bloat, hundreds of loosely relevant references, etc...
