Four lessons I learned from desk rejection: Finding the right journal
A year ago, I led a research project that comprised a dozen Zimbabwean researchers. Our team included crop scientists, environmental engineers, material scientists, pharmaceutical scientists, public health experts, molecular biologists, and physical chemists. Working on the project was exciting and eye-opening because of the various perspectives and experiences our team members brought.
The struggle began when we wanted to publish the work in a peer-reviewed journal. We submitted it to one journal, and the response came the next morning:
After initial screening, I regret to inform you that it does not fit within the scope of the journal, and I must therefore reject it.
We tried another journal. We waited one month to get the comments from the editor:
[W]e do not feel that your paper provides the kind of sufficiently robust conceptual insights and conclusions that would likely engage our broad readership of sustainability scholars.
I do not know how many times I read the phrase ‘robust conceptual insights’, but each time it forced me into the five stages of grief: no, they didn’t mean it; who do they think they are; why did they do this to us; I wasted my colleagues' time chasing white rabbits; and finally, we will try another journal.
And we did this repeatedly, and the result was always the same – rejection by the editor without sending the manuscript out to peer reviewers. The most disappointing comment was from a journal that said, “This is a very interesting and useful paper which I think should be published”, and then proceeded to reject our manuscript. At this stage, I wanted to give up.
My friends and I wrote a multilevel STI policy analysis (continental, regional, country, and sectoral) looking at policy coherence. That was the easy part. It has now been desk rejected by 8 journals for being regional (??? African). Any suggestions for non-anti Africa journals
— Edmond Sanganyado (@ESanganyado) June 2, 2022
After a year of desk rejections, our manuscript was sent out for peer review, and the reviewers’ comments were all positive and constructive.
In this article, I will share the lessons I learned dealing with desk rejection.
Beware of the lure of the impact factor
I confess. I am an advocate and a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). I believe using journal impact factors and university rankings to assess research quality is misguided and detrimental to good science. However, my institution and funding organizations assess my performance based on these meaningless metrics. In the end, I submitted the manuscript to journals such as Nature Sustainability, Research Policy, and Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions.
Always check the aims and scope of the journal
Journals often state their aim, which is usually written as a research statement listing concepts, practices, procedures, and phenomena that the journal aligns with. Sometimes the journal provides a list of the research areas it covers and the article types it considers.
To better understand the aims and scope of the journal, I later decided to read a handful of recently published articles on my research topic in our target journals. I realized that relying on the aims and scope provided by the journal was not enough; after all, journals are dynamic, and most of their aims and scope are rarely updated.
Do not hesitate to rewrite the whole manuscript
The manuscript I first submitted to Nature Sustainability and Research Policy is different from the one that is currently under a second round of peer review. The general theme is similar, but the objectives, structure, content, and illustrations are now different. In fact, the manuscript that went for a first round of peer review is different from the one which is under a second round of peer review.
Reason? Substantial and intentional revision. My co-authors and I did not hesitate to go back to the drawing board, look at our errors, identify key editor comments, and rewrite the manuscript.
Let your local context dance with a sound theoretical framework
The most frequent reason my manuscript was rejected was that it was ‘too regional’. This was surprising because the study analyzed science, technology, and innovation policies in Africa while using Zimbabwe as a case study. In my mind, there was nothing regional about the manuscript.
I later realized my mistake after reading a comment from one reviewer who said that the manuscript would be interesting and wide-reaching if we could base it on a theoretical rather than just a practical perspective. There were several theories in economics and human behavior that we assumed in our research but never discussed in the manuscript. Hence, our revisions centered on these theories and used them as a framework for the redesigned investigation.
What have you learned from desk rejection and finding the right journal?
Edmond Sanganyado is a senior lecturer in Environmental Forensics at Northumbria University, UK. Before that, he was an associate professor at Shantou University, China. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Toxicology from the University of California Riverside, USA, and a BSc (Hons) in Applied Chemistry from the National University of Science and Technology, Zimbabwe. He is interested in understanding the behavior of chemicals in the environment, and his primary goal is to develop techniques for mitigating chemical pollution.
Edmond is associate editor of Frontiers in Water, academic editor of PLoS ONE and PeerJ, and editorial board member of Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management, BMC Chemistry and Communications Earth & Environment. He is a member of the Zimbabwe Young Academy of Sciences and the Global Young Academy. Edmond was elected as a Fellow of the Institution of Environmental Science in recognition of his outstanding contributions to environmental science and sustainability.