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Good desk rejection criteria do two jobs at once: they stop the wrong papers reaching your reviewers, and they stop the right papers being held up by checks that belong later in the process. Most journals get the first half roughly right and the second half wrong, which is why screening feels slow and reviewers

Learning how to desk reject a manuscript is not really about deciding. Most editors know within ten minutes which papers should not go to review. The difficulty is everything that comes afterwards: the letter, the appeal, the email chain that runs for three weeks, and the uncomfortable feeling that the decision was a judgement you

Most small journals do not have a reviewer database. They have the editor’s address book, and it runs out at about the sixth name. Learning how to find peer reviewers systematically — rather than asking the same handful of colleagues until they stop replying — is the single biggest lever on turnaround time that a

AI-hallucinated citations have moved from a curiosity discussed at conferences to something sitting in your submission queue this week. A language model asked to support a claim will produce a citation that has the shape of a real one — correct journal, plausible authors, a volume and page range in the right register — without

Fabricated references are no longer a rare curiosity in scholarly submissions. They are a routine screening problem, and most small journals have no process for catching them. A reference that does not exist reads exactly like one that does: plausible authors, a real journal, a volume and issue that look right, page numbers in a