Resource of the Week #152: Reasons That Editors Reject or Accept Articles

Hello again. This week’s resource is a pair of articles from Elsevier Connect, a website from the company Elsevier. In these articles, journal editors identify factors that tend to make articles unpublishable or publishable.

In the first article, “A Journal Editor Reveals the Top Reasons So Many Manuscripts Don’t Make It to the Peer Review Process”, the editor of the journal Carbon identifies 8 common reasons that articles are rejected—sometimes even before peer review.

Among these reasons are inconsistency with the aims and scope of the journal, incompleteness, defective research methods or unsuitable data analysis, unsupported conclusions, and incomprehensible writing.

A sequel to this article is titled “8 Reasons I Accepted Your Article”. In it, 5 editors—from a variety of journals—identify characteristics that help make articles desirable to publish.

The article indicates that in addition to avoiding the reasons for rejection, articles that editors like to accept have specific pluses. In particular, the editors emphasized wanting to publish articles that provide new, important insights.

Reading these 2 articles can help ensure that one’s articles are acceptable—and, in fact, attractive—to journal editors.  I hope you find these articles useful.

Until the next post—

Barbara