Hi.
I'm Karen McKee, retired scientist and author.
Today, I'm going to be talking about writing mistakes that may get your manuscript rejected.
As an author, I know how disappointing it is to have a paper rejected, especially when
you've worked so hard to conduct the study and to write the manuscript.
It's even more depressing when the reason for rejection is a common mistake that could
have been easily avoided.
So in this video, I'm going to cover some of the most common writing mistakes and what
you can do to avoid them.
Let's first consider a somewhat surprising but common mistake.
Some authors will submit a manuscript that is incomplete, lacking one or more essential
elements such as the abstract or some of the references cited in the narrative.
Perhaps they were in a hurry to submit or thought these components could be added later,
perhaps with the reviewer's or editor's help.
Or, they failed to read the author guidelines carefully (or at all) and did not adhere to
the journal's formatting requirements, again thinking that these edits would be made later
after the paper is accepted.
Well, it's wrong to assume that submitting anything but a complete manuscript formatted
to the journal's specifications is acceptable.
If you make this mistake, it not only tells the editor that you can't follow directions,
it raises the question of how careful you were in conducting the research.
These mistakes will almost certainly cause immediate rejection of your manuscript without
review.
The fix for this mistake is really easy, though.
Read the author instructions and follow them to the letter.
Now, I'm going to talk about mistakes common to specific sections of a paper.
Let's first consider the part of your paper that will tell the editor and reviewers whether
to seriously consider your manuscript for publication: and that is the abstract.
Writing a poor abstract, one that is uninformative, contains sweeping generalizations unsupported
by the data, or ends with a statement such as "results will be discussed" should be avoided.
The abstract is the first section that a reviewer will read, and you don't want to start off
on the wrong foot.
When I review a paper with a poorly written abstract, I automatically anticipate that
the rest of the paper is going to be torture to read, which often turns out to be the case.
Writing a decent abstract is easy, however, if you know what it should contain and how
to structure it.
Briefly, your abstract should cover the following points, each in one or two sentences: the
background or aim of the study, the question or hypothesis addressed, the methods, key
findings, and conclusions or significance of the work.
You can learn more about how to write a great abstract in another video I've done.
I'll include a link to it in the description below this video.
Another mistake is that your introduction does not state a clear objective or hypothesis
and does not explain why the study is important.
This is a common error made by authors who assume that the reviewers and editor will
somehow intuit the point of the study without being told.
In fact, making the case for the importance of your research is key to convincing a journal
to publish your work.
Failure to spell out the problem your study addressed and why readers should be interested
in it marks you as a novice author who doesn't understand what's expected in a scientific
article.
The solution is to make sure you cover the following three points in the introduction:
One.
Why is the problem you researched important?
Two.
Review current knowledge about the topic and point out what is missing.
Three.
State your research question and explain how it addresses that gap in knowledge.
OK.
That's a lot to take in.
I'm going to stop here and cover the remainder of the mistakes in part two.