Design flaws and poor language: Two key reasons why manuscripts get rejected from Austral Ecology across all countries between 2017 and 2020

Abstract

Publications are important for communicating scientific discoveries. They are also one of the critical aspects of gauging success in an ecologist’s research career and have been since the 1940s when the idea of ‘publish or perish’ first emerged (Carpenter et al. 2014). We inherently assess someone’s career track record based on a range of metrics that take into account the number of publications, number of citations and the number of years a researcher has been an active researcher: most metrics that are fraught with underlying biases (Ioannidis et al. 2019). To append to this list of successful outputs, all researchers have many a manuscript rejection letter tucked away in their archives; and depending on where we send our manuscripts, we may end up with many more rejection emails from journals than acceptance letters. Such rejections are part of the scientific process (Ali 2010): it can be a very brutal process, but also can be very helpful in our development of strong scientific arguments (Kim et al. 2019). Rejection of manuscripts is one of the most difficult decisions to deal with as an Editor‐in‐Chief. The manuscript review process is one of the most important, and in many instances, one of the most controversial aspects of science, and the rejection of manuscripts plays a vital role in this aspect. By no means is the process perfect, but peer review is a key foundation to the scientific process that enables researchers to learn and grow in their scientific endeavours.