I have a nice research paper with me that I wrote some time ago. I submitted to half a dozen journals in the hope that it would get accepted for publication. However, for one reason or the other, it gets rejected every time. I have finally submitted it to another journal in the hope that it would get accepted. Following application, that I use as a cover letter for my submissions, highlights the reasons I have not been able to get it published so far. It would be really nice of you to read it to the end and. if possible, suggest me a solution to my problem.
To Whom It May Concern
Respected Sir/Madam:
I hope that you are fine. I am writing this letter to you concerning a research paper that is basically an outcome of the research work I did in France Telecom as a postdoctoral researcher. I did this work between February, 2010 and February 2011. I would like to explain a few things about this work to you. I shall be very grateful to you for reading this letter till the end.
As soon as I finished writing this paper I submitted it to IEEE Transactions on Audio, Language and Speech Processing. After a few months, I received the reviews that required me to do some major rework. The paper was rejected.
I addressed some of their concerns that I possibly could given my constraints. Addressing the rest of the concerns required me to be present on the research institution as they required reuse or preparation of the data that is a proprietary of France Telecom. I could not do that as my tenure in the institution had ended and I was no longer working there.
After that, I have been submitting it to various other journals and the work got rejected for reasons out of my control. I would like to elaborate on those reasons a little bit. One of the journals I submitted it to is the Springer’s journal for applied soft computing. They rejected it for the irrelevance of this work to their journal. My work is basically an application of evolutionary algorithms to a problem domain in telecommunications.
One of the journals I submitted it to is the Springer’s journal for applied soft computing. They rejected it for the irrelevance of this work to their journal. My work is basically an application of evolutionary algorithms to a problem domain in telecommunications.
Another journal, Springer’s annals of telecommunications, rejected it for being too long. My paper is around 17 pages long in a standard two column format.
Another journal has also rejected it but I strongly suspect that the reviewers altogether failed to understand the nature of the work presented in it. No pun intended though. This can happen naturally especially if reviewers are from different academic backgrounds or scientific domains.
An open access journal owned by Hindawi (and Eurasip) accepted our work after formal peer review. We could not get it published because we could not afford the fees of their open access publishing option at that time. Recently, the paper was also accepted by IEEE Access, a multidisciplinary open access journal of IEEE. The paper has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and has also been unanimously accepted for publication by all the reviewers. The reviewers comments have also been addressed. However, it is a policy of my previous institution to not support its publication in any open access journal.
After that, I submitted the article to IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. I had to submit an abridged version of the paper that is only fourteen pages long. As I received the reviews, I was disappointed to learn that the paper was rejected due to lack of information. The reviewers and the editor advised me to resubmit the paper. As I addressed the concerns of the reviewers, the original manuscript, which was seventeen pages long, became eighteen pages long instead. I resubmitted the manuscript to the journal again. After a couple of days, I received an email informing me that my article had been rejected by the journal due to being too long.
Finally, and after much thought, I am submitting it to your journal in the hope that it would eventually be accepted for publication. I particularly do not like to abridge the article asI believe that it has very valuable information that would be compromised. As a matter of fact, one reason I believe it was rejected by the IEEE transactions on audio, speech and language processing is because I submitted an abridged version of the paper to them as per their demand. The paradox of submitting an abridged version is that most journals do not accept very long papers and, hence, a paper gets rejected outright. However, when an abridged version is submitted, a lot of valuable information is curtailed and omitted from the paper, as a result of which the paper gets rejected again by the reviewers.
In submitting this paper to your journal, I hope that it would be accepted for publication. In any case, if you find this paper unsuitable for publication in your journal, I earnestly request you to suggest me a nice alternative journal which would most likely accept my paper. I shall be very thankful for your valuable suggestion. I am quite thankful to you anyway for reading my application to this point.
Sincerely yours,
If you found an error, highlight it and press Shift + Enter or click here to inform us.
Of Journals and Rejections by Psyops Prime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.