How to Get Your Article Rejected

As an Associate Editor, I handle a considerable number of manuscripts submitted to Stress and Health for consideration for publication. Many of these articles are rejected from the journal. Sometimes manuscripts are rejected because they are deemed not to make a sufficiently original contribution to the field or contain ‘fatal flaws’. Often there is very little that can be done in such cases, other than to identify an original question or repeat the study ironing out the fatal flaw. However, many manuscripts are rejected for reasons that have little to do with the reported research, which may be original and competently conducted. Instead, the researcher may have failed to make a convincing case for the inclusion of the research in the journal, omitted crucial details or committed errors in their writing, some of which border on the felonious. In some cases, so blatant is the lack of detail, omissions or errors that I can only conclude that the author’s aim was to get their manuscript rejected. So great is this apparent need for rejection that I feel duty-bound to provide a set of guidelines to assist authors in getting their manuscripts rejected from Stress and Health. What follows therefore is my comprehensive set of guidelines on what to do when preparing a manuscript for publication in Stress and Health, or any social science journal for that matter, if you want to substantially increase the chances of your manuscript being rejected. I anticipate that authors following these guidelines will have no troubles in getting a reject decision and the best thing is that these guidelines will probably work for most journals. Along the way I will cite some recent examples of articles published in Stress and Health whose authors made a real hash of getting rejected by disregarding most of my guidelines. If you are keen to get that rejection letter from the Associate Editor of the journal to which you plan to submit your work, you would do well to avoid following their example.