The publication web project I started back in 2008, as a postdoc at McGill, finally made it to adulthood! The article is to be released today in Science Express:
Flows of research manuscripts among scientific journals reveal hidden submission patterns
by Calcagno V, Demoinet E, Gollner K, Guidi L, Ruths D and de Mazancourt C.
Thank you very much to the 100,000 scientific authors or so who bothered to respond to my emails!! From the 220,000 emails I had sent, I gathered some 80,000 usable replies, each containing the submission history of one published article. From these we were able to construct a resubmission network describing the manuscripts flows connecting over 1,000 scientific journals from 16 subject categories, including Nature, Science and PNAS. The analysis of this new type of network revealed intriguing patterns about the submission strategy of authors and the impact of submission history on the post-publication impact of research articles.
SEE THE ARTICLE ON SCIENCE EXPRESS [access pdf for free] (works only from WITHIN the post!)
Learn more about the results in the Science Podcast
Read reports, with comments from experts, in The Scientist Magazine and in the Nature News.
Vincent Calcagno 
I can be placed in the group of researchers that usually (apart once on 10 manuscript submission) got their paper rejected at the first submission. However, my published manuscripts have always improved very much after the revision of referees. Usually we send a ms to a high IF journal hoping the editor send it to referees in order to get the ms well reviewed.
Best Regards,
Giovanni
If you cannot access the pdf for free:
First go WITHIN the post (click on the WITHIN link or the post title) and THEN try the “access pdf for free” link again.
(Science provides a link that works only from a given URL)
Thanks for the interesting article but you omitted the submission history for your paper. How many times was it submitted?
Good point 🙂 Our paper was directly submitted to Science, and is thus a first intent (like 80% of articles published in this journal).