When you submit a paper to a journal, after a while they answer you. The answer can be one of the options including accepted, minor revision needed, major revision needed, or rejected. Obviously, if you received an accepted you do not need to do anything but waiting for your paper to be published. Minor or major revisions mean the paper needs some revision to be publishable, we would write about it on the horizon. Everybody tries to avoid getting a rejected answer. To do so, you need to be familiar with paper rejection reasons.
Paper rejection due to the lack of novelty
One of the most important features of a research paper is its novelty. You need to study
The more creative a paper is, the more interesting it is. A paper lacks in novelty would be boring which is a paper rejection reason itself.
Paper rejection because of design or analysis flaws
The design of research is the base of it and any problems in the base of something causes in wrong conclusions. The choice of research design should be accurate and strongly supported. You can read more on this in “How to write chapter 3”.
Furthermore, the analysis of a study has the same effect on a paper conclusion. As you know research with a wrong conclusion is of no value.
Ethical issues in research
Research ethical issues is a most paper rejection reason too, which can be of several types:
- Plagiarism which is copying one or more sentence/s from other sources without citing them.
- Submitting a paper in more than one journal or submitting a paper which has been published or presented in a congress.
- Hurting people, animals, environment, etc. in the research process.
Any ethical issue definitely results in paper rejection.
Scope of journal and paper
Adhere to the aim of your paper while you are in progress and researching. Your findings and conclusion need to be an answer to your research question. If it is not, it is possible to get a rejection.
In addition, you should submit a paper to a journal with the same scope as it.
