Roger Watson, BSc PhD FRCP Edin FAAN
At the Trailhead
- Why this matters: Desk rejection is a core editorial function that allows editors-in-chief to screen submissions early, manage workload, and protect reviewer capacity.
- What judgment this supports: Rejection without review reflects editorial judgment about scope, novelty, and fit with journal priorities—not necessarily flaws in the research itself.
- How an editor might use this: Understanding desk rejection helps editors make early decisions confidently and communicate those decisions clearly to authors.
Rejection is one of the most visible, and most misunderstood, parts of editorial work. For editors, it is a routine operational decision; for authors, it can feel personal and abrupt. Understanding why editors sometimes reject manuscripts without sending them for peer review—often called desk rejection—helps both sides navigate the publication process more realistically.
The Desk Rejection Process
If you are an editor-in-chief, you will regularly desk reject manuscripts that are submitted to your journal. If you are not rejecting manuscripts, then you should be. It is not possible that all manuscripts are of the same quality and you should not simply be offloading the initial screening decision to your associate editors, otherwise they become overloaded with manuscripts. Desk rejection is a fundamental component of managing copy flow.
Common Reasons for Rejection
Reasons for desk rejection are varied. Manuscripts are submitted which do not fit the scope of your journal; for example, clinical studies being submitted to an educational journal. Certain types of studies may no longer align with the policy of the journal. Editors may decide that pilot or feasibility studies and protocols are no longer desirable, or that particular designs are no longer appropriate—for example descriptive studies and simple pre- and post-test studies when journals are receiving more rigorous experimental work.
These decisions are usually based on the interplay between pressure for space in the journal, the volume of submissions being received, and the number of associate editors available to process manuscripts in a timely manner.
Why Rejection Is Usually Final
Rejection—other than specific “reject and resubmit” decisions, which most editors-in-chief do not use—must be final because editors-in-chief do not have the time and journals do not have the capacity to keep considering the same manuscript repeatedly.
Manuscripts that are allocated to a handling editor and sent to reviewers may undergo cycles of revision—commonly limited to two rounds—before publication or rejection. These manuscripts showed some promise at submission and were judged by the editor-in-chief to be worth the investment of editorial and reviewer time.
But rejection must mean rejection.
Appeals
Journals that follow the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) are strongly advised to have an appeals process against editorial decisions and to set out clearly what the procedure is for appeal. Most good quality journals operate such processes but normally exclude desk rejections from appeal. Given that some journals commonly reject up to 90% of submissions and receive thousands of submissions each year, it would be impractical to permit appeals against desk rejection.
Some journals simply state that a manuscript is not considered suitable for publication; others may give brief reasons for desk rejection. However, appeals against rejections at any stage of the editorial process are rarely upheld and authors are generally better advised, unless a clear mistake has been made in the review process, not to appeal but to take any comments into account and submit the manuscript to another journal.
Resubmission After Rejection
Another rejection—and one which is extremely irritating as an editor-in-chief—is the resubmitted rejection.
Editors-in-chief often deal with thousands of submissions annually, hundreds weekly, and dozens daily, and cannot be expected to remember every manuscript. At one time some resubmitted manuscripts may have slipped the editorial net. However, modern editorial management systems can easily detect such submissions through similarity checks and alert the editor-in-chief.
Quite what goes through the mind of someone who, having received a rejection one day and the clear message that a desk rejection is final, simply resubmits the manuscript to the same journal a few days later is not clear. Some authors are quite devious. They change the lead author, alter the title or abstract, or substantially rewrite the text. But the manuscript is still detected and, inevitably, rejected.
In cases where manuscripts have undergone review, some authors misunderstand the comments they receive at rejection. Those comments are intended to be helpful but are not advice on how to revise the manuscript for resubmission to the same journal—even when the rejection letter clearly states that the decision is final.
The Editor’s Perspective
Editors-in-chief are not heartless souls, although when an author is on the receiving end of a rejection—especially a desk rejection—it may not feel like that.
If an author is lucky, a desk rejection will arrive very soon after submission. Although it may not feel fortunate, this means they have encountered an efficient editor-in-chief who reviews submissions frequently. A quick desk rejection allows the author to decide where to submit next and begin the process again. There are few things worse for an author than waiting weeks or months after submitting a manuscript to a journal only to receive a desk rejection.
Editors know how much effort goes into preparing a manuscript. For empirical studies and systematic reviews, the work of writing the paper is over and above the effort of conducting the study itself. Editors are also aware that publication decisions affect doctorates, job applications, promotion, and tenure. For these reasons, rejecting manuscripts is never entirely comfortable.
When Editors Get It Wrong
Editors-in-chief have considerable authority within their journals, but they are not infallible. Other than in cases where publication ethics have been violated or where a clear scientific error has been made, editorial decisions are judgments.
The editor-in-chief must judge whether a manuscript is likely to survive peer review and how much it contributes to the journal or the field. A well-conducted study may not be allocated to an associate editor simply because it offers little new information or because the journal already receives many similar studies.
Associate editors exercise similar judgment. They may decline to send a manuscript for review after closer scrutiny reveals a fatal flaw, or they may determine that the work is not strong enough to warrant peer review.
Even during peer review, reviewers’ recommendations do not determine the outcome. Editors consider those recommendations but ultimately arrive at their own judgment.
Editing, therefore, is not an exact science. Editors will sometimes publish papers that later prove flawed and require corrections or retractions. Equally, they will occasionally reject manuscripts that are later published elsewhere and become highly cited or influential.
The Carry Back
Editors-in-chief know the pain of rejection because they experience it themselves as authors. They must also live with the fact that some of their judgments will inevitably be wrong.
Nevertheless, editors must live with those decisions and continue to function as editors. Editing is not a popularity contest. Rather, it is about exercising judgment transparently, fairly, and to the best of one’s abilities.
Author: Roger Watson
Reviewed and Edited by: Leslie H. Nicoll
Senior Editor for Content Review: Maureen “Shawn” Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN
Citation: Watson R. Why do editors reject manuscripts without peer review? Working Guide to Editorial Systems (WGES). Writer’s Camp. 2026; vol 1, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.0000/wges.2026.001
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