"Communicated by" in a journal article

JinM

Out of curiosity, why would a journal article be communicated by someone other than the author (or even authors, in some cases that I've seen)?

Vanadium 50

A translation?

Andy Resnick

Some journals, such as the Royal Society set of journals, or PNAS, require that the papers be submitted by members, by custom. As a result, if the authors are not members of the Royal Society, or the National Academy, a member will then 'communicate' the paper to the Journal.

I didn't say it makes sense....

Choppy

Posthumous publications?

(Although one might wonder how the revisions are handled.)

dans595

Another possibility is the author has a disability that makes it difficult to write.

mgb_phys

No it's as Andy said. You don't have to put the name of the secretary who typed the paper.

Now somebody who translated the paper from those professors who have a real disability when it comes to writing - that would be useful !

JinM

Yeah, Andy's explanation makes sense to me. I was looking through my linear algebra professor's research articles, and a couple of them were communicated by a different person. The articles in question were published in the Proceedings of the AMS -- is that a journal that also requires membership as Andy describes?

Cincinnatus

Sometimes those lines signify something specific to the journal about how the article came to be published there. For example: PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) will say "contributed by <NAS member>" if that NAS member is on the author list. Or it will say "communicated by <NAS member>" if an NAS member was willing to vouch for the paper but did not themselves write it / knew the author / whatever. Some PNAS papers instead will say "this was a PNAS direct submission" that means that it was submitted normally with no NAS members involved.

I've heard that the acceptance rates are dramatically different for "contributed by", "communicated by" and "direct submission" papers....