Rejections

Good morning/afternoon/evening (wherever you are)
Many of you have to deal with decisions regarding your articles that get sent to your journals everyday Right?
There is nothing like having the power of being an editor and accepting an article for publication, but I wonder how you feel about rejecting them, do you feel pleasure, guilt or just don’t care?

The rejection of an article can be very disappointing to an author especially if it has not been peer reviewed. So why the immediate reject? Is it because it is just plain rubbish? Well sometimes it is, but more often a journal has to think about the priority of articles it accepts especially the large journals. Other aspects could be; insufficient originality, serious scientific flaws, or the absence of a message that is important to your audience.

I imagine there are many ways of reading a research article and many editors have their own little tricks and checklists they follow. I wonder how much of the paper is read, is it every word of the paper (I think not), is it just the abstract and a skim of the text, just the abstract, just the tables, etc.

If an article is rejected within 48 hours then surely that is a bonus to he author for not wasting their time or I wonder do they feel a bit disgruntled with a feeling of not having their article read properly.

Can you get the gist of an article just from an abstract, I know my answer I wonder if it is the same as yours?

Rejecting after review is another tricky one especially if it has positive reviews but it just does not quite make the grade, a difficult reject letter to write, but remember all structured criticism is a good thing and is to improve articles after revision with the reviewers comments taken into account.

At the end of the day just remember be very nice you your authors because without them you can’t pay your mortgage.

TTFN