Q: Should I update my ready-to-submit manuscript for relevant literature that was recently published?
I was going to submit a manuscript when I found that a relevant paper was published by another author. I plan to discuss this paper and, if possible, to perform a comparative analysis on its data. However, as the paper was just published, its sequence information in Genbank has not been opened to the public yet. I could submit my manuscript presently without the comparison, but the sequence information would not be available until my manuscript is peer reviewed. What should I do?
Asked on 14 Jan, 2020
It is good that you are keeping track of relevant literature and are keen to discuss this other paper in your paper. It shows that you wish to do due diligence and wish to include the most current relevant literature in your paper. Unfortunately, as you have written, this paper’s sequence information is not yet available from Genbank, and from what we know, it will be available only at a time determined by the author. This may be soon or it may take time. So, as you have mentioned, it would be better to go ahead and submit your paper as it is ready. If needed, you could discuss only the theoretical aspects of the other paper for now. For the data, you could add a note such as ‘sequence information unavailable at present.’ Later, when making the peer review changes, if the sequence information is indeed available by then, you could include that too.
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