When you finished writing your research paper, it is time to submit it for a journal. After a while, the journal would answer to you, which can be “accepted”, “needs proofreading”, or “rejected”. No one likes to get a “rejected” answer. To avoid getting such an answer, you need to know the most common reasons for paper rejection.

As you know, one of our services is to get your papers published. Due to every day corresponding with editors, we are aware of the most important reasons for rejecting a paper which you can read of in this post.

The paper does not fall into the journal’s scope

The area of your research reflects in the paper’s title which is the first thing can be seen.

On the other hand, each journal is dedicated to a specific area and only publishes papers with the same scope. So it is weird if the editors reject papers which cannot cover that scope.

To avoid this kind of rejection, search for journals with the same scope of your paper and submit the research paper to them.

The paper is poorly written

When the editor starts reading a paper, he needs to understand the language. A paper full of jargons, grammatical errors, and with problems in words usage if is not impossible, will be hard to understand.

To avoid this problem, make use of dictionaries, pay attention to the fixed phrases used in other papers and books, or structure of sentences and try to apply them in your own paper. Furthermore, be clear, use simple grammar, and explain every concept enough so that the reader can understand exactly what you mean.

The paper lacks of novelty

The main aim of conducting research which leads to writing a research paper, is to find out something new that the other researchers have not deal with before.

To do so, you have to read lots of papers and search on the subject you have chosen. Find the gap in them. Most of the papers offer something for more researches in the conclusion section. You can refer to them. Prove that there was a gap and you were trying to fill that gap in your research.

A paper lacks in novelty would be boring which is a paper rejection reason itself.

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.

The content of the paper is not convincing

Having problems in the evidence, methods, analyses, results, and conclusion is the other common reason for paper rejection.

You need to follow the rules of writing a paper. We have discussed each section of a research paper separately. Generally, your evidence for the gap, the chosen methods and questionnaires applied, the way you analyzed the data, and the conclusion should be convincing.

In scientific research, everything should be logical and makes sense. In addition to the content of the paper, the way the content is proposed should also follow a logical way.

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.