Peer review journals publishes popular, useful but properly justified articles. Each and every papers must propose some new observations. The drawbacks from the study must be clearly mentioned so that other people can try to overcome the same.
Publication in peer review journals are respected worldwide.That is why publishing in one of them is extremely hard. But there are some points that editors and reviewers of such journals look for in an submitted article without which they generally cite their inability to publish the paper.
After going through many review comments which had rejected the submitted papers I have found that following points are important for avoid rejection from peer review journals:
1.The submitted article must match with the scope of the journal.Any author can find the scope of the journal in the journal home page.But he/she should also browse through the published articles of the journal to have an idea about the topics and studies the journal likes to publish.It is even better to communicate with the Editors of the journal with your paper title and abstract before submission of the full paper for review. Generally the Editors are kind enough to reply with the suitability of the article for publication in the journal.(Visit http://www.surfat10.com for a tool which analyzes article suitability for submission in a journal)
2. After a suitable journal is identified the next step will be to ensure that all the facts are referenced properly.Any quotes also must be cited.If any opinions are given in the journal it must be properly justified and supported with reference to previously published articles.
3. The study described in the paper must be justified properly.The reason for conducting the study must also be delineated clearly citing proper reference.
4. Any methods adopted must also be justified.All the methods and procedures must be supported with proper reference.
5. The Conclusion section of the article has to provide the author with an one or two line summary of the entire study and identify the drawbacks and possible study other researchers can undertake to overcame the drawbacks.
6. While citing references the page numbers of the paragraphs or sections from where the facts or opinions mentioned in the study are supported must be included.
7. The authors must remember that Reviewers are not getting paid for reviewing their article. That is why the article must be self-explanatory and properly structured so that Reviewers can spend minimum time to review the paper.All the abbreviations and list of tables and figures must be provided.The abstract of the article must include:
- the basic objective with reasons for conducting the study,
- a very brief methodology
- an overview of the results
The abstract is the doorway of an article and if it is not properly constructed reviewers will loose their interest to analyze the full text.
8. Again grammatical and vocabulary must be checked as many times as possible.Reviewers do not like an article with grammatical errors. Repeatable words must also be avoided.Synonyms of the same has to be used so that article does not become monotonous.Spelling mistakes are severely penalized.Look for them before submitting in the journal.
Even if an author follows all the steps given above an article can be rejected due to technical mistakes and for scientifically unimportant.Otherwise if the methods are correct and scientifically sound then an article which follows the above points will be very hard to reject.
Editor
http://www.baipatra.ws
Founding Member
http://www.waterandenviromodeling.org
