These editorial judgements are based on such considerations as the degree of advance provided, the breadth of potential interest to researchers and timeliness.

In such cases, even if referees were to certify the manuscript as technically correct, we do not believe that it represents a development of sufficient scientific impact to warrant publication in Nature. If you would like to do this (or transfer to a different Nature Portfolio journal), a link to initiate the process can be found in the… Read moreĪs you may know, we decline a substantial proportion of manuscripts without sending them to referees, so that they may be sent elsewhere without delay. Although I regret that we cannot offer to publish your paper in Nature Physics for editorial reasons, it may be appropriate for our sister journal Nature Communications, and we encourage you to transfer it there. Therefore, we feel that the paper would find a more appropriate home in a specialist journal. However, I regret that we are unable to conclude that your paper provides the sort of new fundamental or general insight in physics, with sufficiently broad implications, that would excite the interest of a wide, non-specialist audience of physicists. In the present case, we have no doubt that your mathematical description of the dynamics of human walking will be of inherent interest to fellow researchers working on this and related topics. I am sorry to have to say that we must take this view concerning your submission. In practice, this means that we decline a majority (and ever increasing proportion) of manuscripts without sending them to referees, in cases where we feel that, even if referees were to certify the manuscript as technically correct, there would not be a sufficiently strong case for publication in Nature Physics. As you may know, in deciding which papers to publish we have to make an editorial judgement about the immediacy of interest to our readers and the degree and nature of the advance demonstrated.

Science advances submission