The Journal Decision-Making Process

Abstract

Top-tier journals receive several thousand manuscripts per year and publish less than 10% of them [1]. Even run-of-the-mill journals receive at least several manuscripts per day and publish less than one-third of them. So journals start by triaging the manuscripts they receive. Each incoming manuscript will be assigned to an Associate Editor or Section Editor. That Editor will not read the entire manuscript. He or she will only read the manuscript’s title page, the Abstract, and maybe the cover letter. Based on just those two or three pages, that Editor will then make a decision either to send the manuscript out for peer review or (more often) to reject it without peer review [1–5]. The supply of peer reviewers’ volunteered time for a journal is not unlimited, so Editors try to avoid soliciting reviews for manuscripts that they know they will never publish anyway [6]. Some common reasons for rejection without peer review include: 1) the manuscript does not fit the scope of the journal, 2) the topic appears to be of low interest for the readership, 3) the quality of evidence (in terms of study design, sample size, etc.) appears clearly below the usual standards of the journal, 4) the manuscript itself is very poorly prepared [1, 7, 8]. Any journal Editor who has been on the job for more than a month has already read hundreds of papers submitted to that journal, so his or her judgments about which manuscripts have no chance of ever being published at their journal are rarely to never wrong, especially if he or she is the Editor who actually makes that decision. So if your manuscript is rejected from a journal without peer review, just consult your co-authors and move on to the next journal; do not waste your time and energy feeling dejected or trying to dispute the journal’s decision [6, 9–14].