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Desk-rejection boiler-plate from editors?

In our new "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

As an early career scholar just starting to publish, does it really mean anything when you get a desk rejection and the justification emphasizes it's not about quality but scope? Or is that just boilerplate?

I sent a paper to a journal the publishes specifically on X philosophy. My paper dealt with that, but could also be said to deal with Y philosophy and the editor felt it was more a Y paper than an X paper–which is fair.

I'm just wondering whether I should put any stock into "the topic's important" and the emphasis it was not rejected because of quality only scope.

Hmm…not sure. I've had plenty of desk-rejections accompanied by boilerplate that sounds a lot like this. But, from the OP's description, it seems like the editor may have said something more specific.

What do other readers think?

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2 responses to “Desk-rejection boiler-plate from editors?”

  1. TT

    When an editor decides to desk reject in many editorial management systems, an email draft is automatically generated with some boilerplate content like “We get ever so many submissions so we have to reject even very good ones; please submit again soon so we can reject your next paper too.” The editor can then edit the draft if they want to say something specific to the case in question.
    Since what you’re describing is a reason for rejection that wouldn’t be appropriate in every case, it seems likely that the editor manually went in and offered an explanation, which means it is likely that that really was the explanation, which means that (probably) the editor thought the piece would have been publishable somewhere else (or they would just have sent the boilerplate implicating that the paper was not high enough quality to publish).

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  2. Just one?

    Honestly, rejection is so commonplace these days that it’s hard to generalize from one example. If you get a lot of these, you might want to rethink the paper. But one desk rejection is a very noisy signal.

    Reply

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