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Writing a Cover Letter for Your Manuscript

Published under Concept Paper .

The main aim of the cover letter to the editor is to publish your paper to the journal in first attempt so you must write it nicely. Utmost care should be taken to attract the editor’s attention and provide a reason for sending your paper out for external peer review.

Tips for writing a good cover letter:

Address the editor-in-chief (EIC) by name which implies that you know the journal’s editorial committee and have bothered to check. Ensure that your letter is not too short or too long and that it does not simply repeat the abstract. Highlight the novel aspect of your work and why the journal readership would find this important. Indicate why this work fits the journal’s scope.

Make sure your cover letter contains these sentences: We confirm that this manuscript has not been published elsewhere and is not currently under consideration by another journal. All authors have approved the manuscript and agree with its submission to this journal.

Manuscript submission and editorial handling

Choosing a suitable journal is an important aspect of publishing your scientific work. Therefore, you should check the aims, interests, scope, etc. of the journal in question. Follow the author guidelines to avoid delays because of the lack of adherence to journal submission instructions.

Once your manuscript is received by the online system, it will be scrutinized carefully by the editorial assistant. Then the EIC will assess your manuscript and, unless the work is very poor, will assign it to an associate editor who is a member of the editorial committee. The associate editor will assess the manuscript and the main decision at that stage will be to send it out for external peer review or to reject it without such a review. However, if your manuscript is deemed worthy of external peer review, then you have clearly attracted the attention of the editors and pitched the work to an appropriate journal, regardless of the final outcome.

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