How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

The reject letter
The review process (How to deal with editors)
Publishing the paper

Now let us suppose that you get a reject letter. (Almost all editors say “unacceptable” or “unacceptable in its present form”; seldom is the harsh word “reject” used.) Before you begin to weep, do two things. First, remind yourself that you have a lot of company; good journals commonly have rejection rates of 50 percent or considerably more. If your paper receives peer review but is not accepted, you will still receive the reviewers’ comments. These comments can guide you in how to proceed. For example, upon reading the comments, you might conclude that additional research is needed to yield a paper acceptable to a journal of the current type. Or you may realize that if you make some of the suggested revisions, the paper might be well suited for a more specialized journal. Learn from the feedback, and proceed accordingly.

Most of all, do not be discouraged. Papers often are rejected by the first journal to which they were sent; always having one’s papers accepted on the first try probably means that one is not aiming high enough. If you do good research, work hard on presenting it well, are responsive to feedback from editors and reviewers, and persevere, almost certainly your paper will appear in a journal.