Professional Development


67 - Rejected manuscripts I
The procedure for writing, submitting, peer review and, finally, obtaining approval for a scientific article is difficult and time-consuming. Often, we will send a manuscript to a journal, and it will be rejected. In these cases, we must take some time to reflect on the rejection. Perhaps something was wrong in the article. The editor or referees' letter usually points out what was wrong, but other times we need to find out ourselves. We must always keep in mind that the demand to publish in the best journals of each area is very high. There are too many authors for too little publication space. Therefore, these journals usually follow strict criteria to select manuscripts and the rate of rejection is higher than in other journals. If your manuscript is rejected, do not be discouraged: send it to another journal. You might be successful.However, we must consider our own mistakes. Perhaps the manuscript was rejected because our research topic was unfit for the scope of the journal. Our experimental design may have been poor and we need to reconsider if it was worthy of publication. The manuscript was not well written, then perhaps the message of the study was lost or not understood. The editor rejected the manuscript because it did not follow the journal's style. Maybe the manuscript is adequate but the conclusions are speculative and unjustified by the scientific evidence. Finally, we cannot discard possible bias of editors and referees who disagree with our research field or techniques.If we detect some of these plausible possibilities for rejection, we must first take some time to reflect and decide whether our findings are worthy of publishing. If so, the manuscript should be corrected and sent to another journal.