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To learn how to write effective emails, see Chapter 13 in English for Academic
Correspondence .

20.13 Dealing with rejections

Most journals reject large numbers of papers. In general, the higher the impact fac-
tor of a journal, the higher the risk of rejection. Don’t be demoralized – yours is

certainly not the first paper to have been rejected! See 12.2 in English for Academic
Correspondence.
The highest ranked journals also tend to have the fastest turnaround and may thus

return your rejected paper quite quickly. The benefit to you is that you are likely to
be given a peer review of an excellent standard, which should help you to revise
your paper before submitting it elsewhere. See rejection as an opportunity for mak-
ing your paper even better.

To give you an idea of how difficult it is to publish a paper in a top ranking journal, here
are some statistics from the ‘Welcome to resources for authors’ page of the website of
the British Medical Journal (BMJ), one of the world’s most prestigious journals.

We can publish only about 7% of the 7,000–8,000 articles we receive each year.

We reject about two thirds of all submissions without sending them for external review.

However there are still advantages of sending your paper to such a journal, even if there
is a very high chance of rejection. The BMJ makes very quick decisions (2–3 weeks)
so you don’t really delay your chances of publishing elsewhere. If they don’t even send
your paper for external review, it either means your paper is outside the scope of the
journal, or that it has some serious fl aws in terms of science and/or structure and lan-
guage. This is a clear indicator that you need to seriously revise your paper. If the BMJ
does decide to submit your paper to peer review, the reports you will receive from the
reviewers will be very helpful in indicating how your paper can be improved.

See Chapter 12 in English for Academic Correspondence to learn how to write to
editors.

20.14 Take the editor’s and reviewers’ comments seriously

There is a tendency to only take into account the editor’s and referees’ comments
that you agree with and to discount everything else. However, if a referee says that
he/she cannot understand what you mean, there is a very good chance that readers
will have the same problem.