Tag: writing

Desk Rejection – The Author’s Nightmare

You have just finished writing another manuscript and you have zeroed in on a suitable journal with high impact factor where you intend to publish the paper. You submitted your manuscript and went to sleep feeling fulfilled. The next morning, it was back on your desk (email) – rejected! The feeling is akin to how a young man feels when a woman turns down his marriage proposal. It is usually a sore and painful feeling. How do you like the email below sent to you within 24 hours of submitting your manuscript?

To begin with, desk rejection is when an editor returns your manuscript without even the courtesy of sending it out for peer review. In simple terms, the editor is saying “your paper is not good enough for our journal in its current form”. In some cases, the rejection is so quick that you feel crushed and even rejected. After a few days of recovery from the rude shock, then you gather courage and send it to another journal. But the next couple of days, it is bounced back to you again with the same bad news – “rejected” without peer review. At this point most authors become desperate. Perhaps you have submitted the same manuscript to several journals and their verdicts were all sad and same. This is where it becomes tricky and frustrating. In desperation, authors might settle for just any journal that would agree to publish their manuscript. Some even fall into the net of now ubiquitous predatory journals lurking in the shadows of the internet. Others may get demoralized and jettison the idea of publishing the manuscript. This type of reaction can set your research and publication career back. So the first thing to do is to take a second look at your manuscript to know why nobody is interested in reviewing it let alone publish it. But because we are always set in our ways, we do not want to entertain the possibility that there is a problem with our manuscript. We often blame the “cruel” editors who we believe have an axe to grind with us. Occasionally, authors get emotional and send the editor a stinker. A fictional but relatable example of authors lashing out at editors has been presented below:

I have received similar emails from frustrated authors who did not like my decision to desk-reject their papers for obvious reasons. I know you may not have written such an absurd email to an editor before, but you might have felt like doing so. In as much as the above email is a true expression of the authors feeling at the time, it certainly crossed ethical lines. Such a direct attack on an editor borders on blackmail. Depending on the temperament of the editor, they may choose to ignore the email or take a number of steps against the author. Such actions include reporting the author to the author’s institution or international bodies like Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). They might even go an extra mile to blacklist the author from future submissions.

Anyway, my intention in this post is to help you reduce the frequency of desk rejection you receive. Though desk rejection is not totally avoidable, there are several steps you can take to avoid it. I have identified twelve reasons behind most desk rejections. I intend to delve into them in a series of articles. The full list is given below.

• Quality of manuscript
• Grammar and style
• Scope of journal – geographical and thematic
• Adherence to author’s guide
• Method of submission
• Similarity index
• Access type and publication model
• Journal reputation
• Rate of submission to the journal and available resources
• Manuscript format
• Publication model
• Quality of abstract

In this first part of the series, I will concentrate on the first two.

Quality of Manuscript

A high-quality manuscript is an editor’s delight anytime. And this is because high quality articles published in the right journal can trigger a flurry of citation traffic which is good for the reputations of both the journal and the author. Writing a good research paper begins from the conceptualization stage. It must fill a research gap, be well thought out, and be grounded in literature and sound scientific principles. So, the best way to ensure that your paper is of high quality is to give it a strong and proper grounding right from the word go. No editor wants to publish a paper that will be faulted or considered as fundamentally flawed, thus forcing them to got through the very painful process of retraction. Retracting an already published article can be painful both for the editor and the author, and of course, it amounts to a sheer waste of editorial resources.

Building your research on sound theoretical principles is an indispensable baseline for guaranteeing a high-quality research paper. Having said that, you should ask yourself “what gap does my research fill”? A literature gap does not need to be as wide as the Grand Canyon. It can just be a little crack which amounts to a significant contribution to knowledge when filled. A research gap can be conceptual, contextual, contradictory findings, empirical, methodological, policy, population or theoretical. Make sure to identify one or more gaps which will serve as the guiding post for your research. Let me add that the easiest way to identify research gaps is by reading relevant literature. The problem however, is that when a research gap is population-oriented or contextual, editors might not be willing to publish your paper if the context or population does not significantly relate to the wider global population. For instance, a case study of malaria infestation in remote Maigatari, Nigeria might not inspire as much interest in an editor of a double digit impact factor journal as much as a study of COVID conducted in Melbourne, Australia. You may call this bias or discrimination, but it is far from and beyond that. Editors want their publications to be read, cited and used by as many people as possible. The fact is that more people will read the Melbourne study than the Maigatari study. In fact, it is almost unlikely that anybody from Maigatari will read the study given the low level of exposure and literacy. But this is not to suggest that such a paper cannot be published. It definitely can. “So how do I go about this”? You may ask. The solution is to inject and infuse quality into the research. There are several ways to do that, but I will propose two critical and effective approaches. First, in addition to all that has been said so far, develop a robust methodology and if possible, twerk existing methodology to suit your study area while, conforming to established standards. By so doing, your study will spark intellectual curiosity, while imparting a tinge of novelty to the work. Now, curiosity and novelty are the bait editors find difficult to resist. Whether you adopt an existing methodology, develop a new one or modify old ones, remember that description of your methodology must facilitate reproducibility. Secondly, even if your research appears to have a geographical limitations in terms of application, you can extrapolate your findings to have global significance by connecting them to literature and valid scientific inference. So, even if your research has more of local content, discuss it in a global context to give it a global relevance. I have seen several very good research papers marred by a weak and disjointed discussion which is merely a re-statement of the results. On the other hand, a rich discussion goes a step further to make the reader understand why the results occurred as well the theoretical and practical implications of the findings, clearly indicating whether the results confirm or contradict existing knowledge. Enrich your discussion with current relevant literature to properly contextualize and situate it in the mainstream literature. In summary, a good discussion will have the following components

• Insightful interpretation
• Literature integration
• Demonstration of impact
• Amplification of contribution to knowledge
• Identification and acknowledgment of limitations
• Inspiration for future research

Keep in mind that editors usually do not make a judgment regarding the validity of your claims. That is the work of reviewers. What the editor generally does is to ascertain if the manuscript is rich enough to pass to the peer review stage.

Grammar and Style

One of the most annoying things to editors is a badly written manuscript riddled with grammatical errors. This is a big time turn off. I know that only about a fifth of the world’s population can write and speak English fluently, but if you intend to publish your article in an English language journal, you should be able to write in good English. Well, whether you are writing in English or any other language, it is very crucial to get your grammar correct. Careless writing and wrong grammar devalue your work. The first impression of an editor is that you are a loose person who does not pay attention to details. I cannot overemphasize the importance of polished language in manuscript preparation. In fact, the language quality is as important as the quality of the research because language is the vehicle of communication. If you cannot articulately communicate your work to others, then there are chances that no one will ever use your results. Or it might result in the misapplication of your findings.  Incomplete sentences, poor punctuation and misuse of upper case letters are among the most common issues I have observed in manuscripts. There is also the issue of ambiguous statements. Ambiguous sentences are loosely structured sentences that can be interpreted in many different ways by the same or different readers. Ambiguity blurs information and weaken credibility. Have you ever read a sentence and wondered what the writer actually meant? The more you read, the more it messed up your brain – and not for lack of cognitive ability, but because the sentence just seemed slippery. Ambiguous sentences usually result from misuse of terms, articles, tenses or wrong choice of word. An example of ambiguous sentence is:

“Distilled water was poured into a flask containing 2 g of palm kernel ash and 5 g of sawdust ash shaken together for five minutes”.

The natural question the reader would ask is “was the mixture of water, palm kernel ash and sawdust ash shaken together”? or “were palm kernel ash and sawdust ash shaken together before pouring distilled water”? Let’s go ahead and disambiguate the sentence. If the writer implied that the mixture of water, palm kernel ash and sawdust ash were shaken together, then the sentence should read:
 

“Distilled water was poured into a flask containing 2 g of palm kernel ash and 5 g of sawdust ash, and the mixture was then shaken for five minutes”.

 But if, however, the intention was to say that palm kernel ash and sawdust ash were shaken together before pouring distilled water, then the sentence should read:

“A mixture of 2 g of palm kernel ash and 5 g of sawdust ash was shaken in a flask for five minutes before adding distilled water”.

Now, even though the first option was most likely what the author had in mind because it is more scientifically plausible, the second option provides an alternative confounding sense. In essence, the sentence contains two mutually exclusive meanings. Sometimes ambiguities are introduced when the writer attempts to say too much in one sentence. Hence, keeping your sentences moderate in length can reduce ambiguities. For instance, using the case above, we can easily disambiguate the sentence by breaking the sentence into two simple parts as follows:

“Distilled water was poured into a flask containing 2 g of palm kernel ash and 5 g of sawdust ash. The mixture was then shaken for five minutes.” for the first case,

or

 “A mixture of 2 g of palm kernel ash and 5 g of sawdust ash was shaken in a flask for five minutes. Afterwards distilled water was added.” for the second case.

Another type of grammatical problem you need to watch out for is poor choice of words and wrong use of words or terms. Poor or wrong choice of words will distort the information being conveyed by either giving it a different meaning from the message the writer is trying to pass across or making it prone to varied subjective interpretations. A sentence is deemed to be clear when it is understood in the same way by every moderate English speaker. Though the depth of understanding may vary from person to person depending on how knowledgeable they are in the subject, the danger of contradictory interpretations will not arise. If by any means a misunderstanding occurs, it will not be attributable to the sentence or the writer but the reader. While wrong choice of words alters the intended meaning of a sentence, poor choice of word introduces ambiguity. Types of ambiguities resulting from poor choice of word have been presented in Table 1 for your reference and guidance.

Table 1: Ambiguities cause by poor choice of word

Type	Example	Analysis	Correction
Vague time frame	The sample was analyzed soon after collection.	“Soon” is subjective thus depriving the sentence of specificity.	The sample was analyzed within 30 minutes of collection.
Misleading Cause-and-Effect	The cells died due to the new compound.	The use of the term “due to” suggests direct causation without evidence.	The cells appeared to die when exposed to the new compound.
Incorrect Preposition Use	The bacteria were resistant with antibiotics.	“Resistant” does not naturally go with “with”.	The bacteria were resistant to the antibiotics.
Unclear Pronoun Reference	After filtering the solution, it was stored in the refrigerator.	The sentence does not specify whether it was the filter or the solution that was stored in the refrigerator.	The filtrate was stored in the refrigerator.
Wrong Verb Choice	The mixture was treated at 100°C for 5 minutes.	The statement is vague and too general. It is not clear what type of treatment the mixture received.	The mixture was incinerated in the oven at 500°C for 5 minutes.
Ambiguous Quantification	A small amount of catalyst was added.	The use of the term “small” makes the sentence subjective. Secondly the writer did not say what the catalyst was added to.	One gramme of catalyst was added to the mixture.
Improper Conjunction Use	The compound was isolated while it was still hot	“While” is not a specific point in time. This presents a problem for reproducibility.	The compound was isolated immediately after heating
Confusing Homonyms or Polysemes	The test was conducted on the lead sample.	“Lead” has different meanings and can send different signals when used loosely as in this case.	The test was conducted on the lead (Pb) metal sample.

I was almost forgetting the problem of fragmentation. Have you ever read a sentence and felt like someone following a path that leads to nowhere in particular? You read again hoping for meaning or sense, but neither of them was present. Then, it suddenly dawned on you that the sentence was either missing a subject or a predicate (verb), or that the verb was redundant. You were most likely dealing with a fragment. It is not uncommon to find one or two fragments in a manuscript as a result of the author not finishing their thoughts or a sentence being broken into two parts during editing. However, there are situations where a manuscript begins with a fragment, runs on fragments and ends with a fragment. On several occasions, I have read a manuscript or thesis that got me so frustrated because of fragments. Such papers usually constitute a mental torture to the reader. In case you are still wondering what fragments look like, I will give a few simple examples.
 

“In a recent article about loss of habitat due to climate change”.

“Significantly, one particular form of Western Australian finch”.

“The treatment is effective. As the results showed”.

“Becoming extinct because of rising sea temperatures”.

How did you feel reading these sentences? Did you make any sense of them? If you look well, you will notice that they are like open ended questions that require you to fill in the blank spaces without giving you the context. One thing common to all four statements is that none of them makes a complete sense. The first statement was going to tell us what the article said about climate change, but never got to that point. The second one missed out the information regarding the Western Australian finch. The second part of the third statement did not tell us what the results showed, while the last one did not give the subject of the sentence. While the first three lack verbs, the last one was missing the subject. Now let us go ahead and complete the statements.
 

“In a recent article about loss of habitat due to climate change, it was found that sub-Saharan Africa witnessed the highest number of floods in the past five years”.

“Significantly, one particular form of Western Australian finch was observed to be nearing extinction”.

“The results showed that the treatment is effective”.

“Several species of blue-green algae are becoming extinct because of rising sea temperatures”.

Read the sentences again and notice the difference. Now the path leads somewhere definite and you don’t feel lost anymore. It is now obvious that one fragment can introduce a disconnect in your manuscript but several fragments will make it look like a piece of trash.

You should not allow these petty yet annoying grammatical pests to mar your efforts. If your writing style frustrates the editor, he will be more than likely to desk-reject your manuscript to save scarce editorial resources. Even if your paper gets to the review stage by some stroke of luck, reviewers will still not give your paper a pass. Grammatical and syntactical blunders will constitute noise that will most likely bias editors’ and reviewers’ judgment against your manuscript. My advise is to minimize the noise so as to afford the editor a higher chance of fair initial assessment of your submission. You can sort out the grammatical issues by sending the manuscript to professional language editors to straighten it out. But bear in mind that professional language editing can be quite expensive. Besides, with some more effort, commitment and attention to details, you can do it yourself. So, I would say that sending your manuscript to a professional language editor should be your last resort unless you have a lot of money to throw around. Below is a list of strategies for improving the language and style of your manuscript.

• Avoid lengthy sentences. Build your paragraphs with short and clear sentences.
• Use the spell check tool to check and correct your spellings.
• Use the grammar checker tool to check and correct your grammar.
• Apply the 24-hour rule. Just take a break from the manuscript for a while to refresh your eyes and then come back later and read through it again.
• Use free online tools like Grammarly to improve on the writing style.
• Print the manuscript and proofread the hard copy.
• Ask a colleague to proofread your manuscript.

Hopefully, the above guide will help you to tremendously improve your manuscript and minimize the heartache that comes with instant desk rejection. Watch out for the next part soon.

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