The process of submitting to an academic publication is comprehensive. It takes a lot of time to complete all of the paperwork, and once you submit everything, you may have to wait weeks for the results. More times than not, the response ends up being a rejection for most researchers, and if the journal is interested in your work, they will probably still send you a list of corrections that must be performed before you resubmit your work again and repeat the wait process.

If you can find the pre-submission requirements for the academic publication source first, though, you can cut this process significantly down. With extra work on the frontend, you will have less time on the backend to wait and make corrections.

The Steps to Submit Your Article to a Journal

Writing your article is the hard, complicated part, and you’ve done that already! But submitting your article to a potential publisher can be stressful, too. You need to have everything done just right beforehand to limit the risk of rejection.

Before submitting your work, all of these pieces need to be put together clearly and concisely:

●      Choose a journal that covers your scope of research.

●      Read their publication requirements and submission guidelines.

●      Proofread your work to ensure it matches their requirements.

●      Update your bibliography.

●      Check for optimization methods like title, keywords, and length.

●      Compose a cover letter.

●      Have all of your work proofread by an editor or colleague.

●      Submit your article with all of the requirements met.

This can take a long time, especially if the submission guidelines require you to do a lot of tweaking in your research submission.

What is a Pre-Submission Request?

If you went through all of that work to submit your article to a journal that isn’t even interested in the topic, it can be a major backslide towards meeting your goals. Instead, consider sending a presubmission inquiry or request to your targeted journal.

This small step is actually appreciated by many journal publications because it saves them time in having to review and decline work that’s not in their field of interest. In a presubmission inquire, the editors see what you are writing about without weeding through the entire article. In the request, you highlight the important parts of your research and attempt to persuade the editors as to how your work would be in line with the journal’s scope of publication. From there, the editors will be able to let you know if they agree and are interested in your manuscript before you spend the time tweaking it to the journal’s specifications and waiting through the process of submission and acceptance.

This inquiry helps save you time, too, since you can send the same or similar letters to multiple journals and you don’t have to wait until hearing from one before submitting the request to another one. With an actual submission, you can only send your article to one journal at a time and then wait until the rejection is received before attempting to be published with another company. This is especially important if your research findings are time-sensitive.

How to Manage Your Request Efficiently

There are a few steps to submitting the pre-submission inquiry that can help you manage it efficiently. Before you send in your submission, follow these requirements first:

●      Check the scope of the journal and their readership and only write to those in your research area.

●      Follow the guidelines for the pre-submission inquires, including what details to include and any supporting documentation.

●      Find out who the editor is and address them directly through a personalized letter.

●      Keep your inquiry professional and concise.

●      Be sure to include both the title and the abstract of your article.

●      Include the main findings of your research that you want the editor to be aware of that could persuade them to publish your work.

●      Also include why your research falls in line with the scope of the journal and is of interest to the readers.

With these tips, you have a better chance of having your work reviewed by the editor without denials and rejections based on errors or missing information.