If you are rejecting the paper for any reason, the system will email the author with your decision along with your comments. In Your Notepad, there are Best Practices templates to get you started for the three most common reasons for desk rejecting a paper in Step 1: (i) the paper has major deficiencies; (ii) its topic falls outside the mission of the journal; or (iii) its use of International English would create problems for readers of the journals.

Figure 3. Best Practice templates for desk rejection

Select the appropriate Best Practices template and Insert it into your dialogue box. Once the template’s wording is in the Comments for Author field, modify it as needed. The system will fill in for you the placeholders; for example, [ARTICLE-ID], [ARTICLE-TITLE]. When you click the PREVIEW button, you see the message formatted with the placeholders filled in. Just remember to click SUBMIT.

To reject the paper for “Poor English,” the template offers the author the opportunity to resubmit the paper following professional copy-editing. After you insert the wording from the template, you may wish to remove this wording.