“I am sorry to inform you…”

I just received another decision letter for a paper submitted.But this time, it was fast. In less than 24 hours, I received a notification by email (the name of the journal is hidden with xxxxx’s for obvious reasons):

Dear Professor Charpentier,

Thank you for submitting your paper to xxxxx.

In order to provide a quick reply to your submission, an automatic process, has been used according. The process is based on proximity measures between the article you submitted, and recent articles published in our journal.

1) The correlation between your keys words and standard keywords in xxxxx is rather high (0.926).

2) 66% of your keywords do match with the top 10 most cited papers in 2012 in xxxxx, so your paper has 90% chance of getting at least 4 citations in less than a year and at least 17 citations in less than 5 years.

3) The rate of references cited in your article that were published in xxxxx is high enough (37%) to consider a publication in xxxxx

The academic and citation based score is 0.857 which makes the paper suitable for publication. Nevertheless, before publishing the paper, major revisions are necessary,

1) Your style does not fit well with our journal: your sentenses have (on average) 13.3 words, while the standard in this journal is 16.2. We recommend that you use longer sentences or delete some periods in your text.

2) The words you use are not close enough to the scope of the journal: for example, estimator appears only twice  (the average is 4.34) and methodology appears only once (average 3.67).

3) The affiliation is not appropriate: this year, 12% of the articles received were from authors in Canada. In order to reinforce positive discrimination, it would be better if your affiliation were from the Eastern Europe (currently only 4% of the articles we receive are from Eastern Europe). We can provide you with a list of potential universities if necessary.

4) Your name is not valid for xxxxx:

  • For a single authored paper, the most common first letter in the last name of the first author is H not C and your name which contains 11 letters is too long (the average is 7.91 letters). Lastly, more than 62% authors have a middle name, we suggest that you add one,
  • For a paper with two authors, the most common first letter of the first author is D, hence C is fine, but your name is a bit too long since the average number of letters in the last name for the first author is 9.57.

Thus, we recommend either that you change your name (we can provide you with a list if necessary) or that you find another author to add on your paper and delete the last two letters of your last name.

For the reasons listed above, we have to ask for major revisions. When the paper is resubmitted, it will be send to a (human) referee for proofread,

Please note that we receive almost 1,000 submissions a year; our target acceptance rate is 10% and many good papers get rejected.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work.

Sincerely,

(etc)

Damned ! That was close ! Let me find a co-author to add, and I resubmit it !


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Arthur Charpentier (April 1, 2013). “I am sorry to inform you…” Freakonometrics. Retrieved May 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/oupt


9 thoughts on ““I am sorry to inform you…””

  1. J’y ai cru! En plus, vu que j’ai deja entendu parle (vu) d’un article de maths genere aleatoirement se faire accepte avec des minors révisions! Rien ne m’etonne plus!

    1. J’ai presque honte d’avoir fait un poisson d’avril aussi crédible… c’était probablement la dernière année pour le faire, dans deux ans, ça sera monnaie courante !

  2. J’y ai cru jusqu’au paragraphe 3 sur l’affiliation où j’âi commencé à avoir des doutes, puis craqué au 4 sur le nom. Bravo ! Excellent poisson d’avril ! Ou juste une prémonition ?

  3. Excellent! If gender diversification is needed, I can offer a help… Mogwaïs are also welcome in most journals…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.