Dear Dr Fathy

Although there are no specific standards for this issue i.e. the comments a reviewer may depend upon to give a decision of "minor revision" may be the same another reviewer use for "Major revision". So it really differs based on the importance of specific points to each reviewer. But i have seen a course before offered by "Nature Publishing Group": Peer Review Master Class and i guess i can give you some hints:

- Accept: rarely taken. That is used when you are fully convinced of the manuscript's scientific value and you have no or extremely minimal comments.

- Major Revision: When you find the manuscript of sufficient quality and novelity, but there are some concerns that must be addressed before publication, e.g. lack of reporting of essential data or deficient analysis that can be improved.

- Minor Revision: The manuscript is of high quality regarding the design and analysis, but adding some data may improve the readability or a revision from a liguistic perspective is needed.

- Reject: This decision is usually reserved for the following cases

A. The manuscript is not of sufficient novelty to be published.

B. The study suffers major flaws in its design or analysis that the conclusions can not be supported by the presented data.

C. Suspect of ethical liabilties: such as fraud, plagiarism, unethical patint care, inhumane animal handling, etc...

Any way, as a peer reviewer, your job entails guaranteeing the quality and value of the published literature, a huge task that must be taken seriously.

Kind Regards

Dear Dr Fathy

Although there are no specific standards for this issue i.e. the comments a reviewer may depend upon to give a decision of "minor revision" may be the same another reviewer use for "Major revision". So it really differs based on the importance of specific points to each reviewer. But i have seen a course before offered by "Nature Publishing Group": Peer Review Master Class and i guess i can give you some hints:

- Accept: rarely taken. That is used when you are fully convinced of the manuscript's scientific value and you have no or extremely minimal comments.

- Major Revision: When you find the manuscript of sufficient quality and novelity, but there are some concerns that must be addressed before publication, e.g. lack of reporting of essential data or deficient analysis that can be improved.

- Minor Revision: The manuscript is of high quality regarding the design and analysis, but adding some data may improve the readability or a revision from a liguistic perspective is needed.

- Reject: This decision is usually reserved for the following cases

A. The manuscript is not of sufficient novelty to be published.

B. The study suffers major flaws in its design or analysis that the conclusions can not be supported by the presented data.

C. Suspect of ethical liabilties: such as fraud, plagiarism, unethical patint care, inhumane animal handling, etc...

Any way, as a peer reviewer, your job entails guaranteeing the quality and value of the published literature, a huge task that must be taken seriously.

Kind Regards

It strongly depends on a journal but one obvious situation ripe for rejection is if the reviewer finds an error that cannot be fixed by the authors within a reasonable amount of time.

In my opinion the decision depends on two main ingredients: the paper itself and the quality of the journal. In general lines, Dr. Abushouk described the points that an editor, and as consequence, the journal, should consider in order to reach a decision about the manuscript submitted. On the other hand, as mentioned by Dr. Sergyeyev, this decision also depends on the journal. A well established and major journal, take Nature or one of the top 5 journals in your field as examples, may reject very good papers, which may be perfectly acceptable in good journals.

Here you can find some instructions/observations from a respectable journal about the points you asked about: http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/for-reviewers#question3

'Eight reasons I rejected your article'

A journal editor reveals the top reasons so many manuscripts don’t make it to the peer review process

When a manuscript is submitted to a high-quality scholarly journal, it goes through intense scrutiny — even before it's seen by the editor-in-chief and selected for peer review. At Elsevier, between 30 percent to 50 percent of articles don't even make it to the peer review process.

Eight reasons of paper rejection are:

1. It fails the technical screening.

2. It does not fall within the Aims and Scope.

3. It's incomplete.

4. The procedures and/or analysis of the data is seen to be defective.

5. The conclusions cannot be justified on the basis of the rest of the paper.

6. It's simply a small extension of a different paper, often from the same authors.

7. It's incomprehensible.

8. It's boring.

https://www.elsevier.com/connect/8-reasons-i-rejected-your-article

Adding to Subhash C. Kundu reasons

9) Flaws in peer review process.

10)Incompetent Reviewer

As a Peer Reviewer: When you should say Rejected Manuscript?

You can also refer to the following RG link:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/In_your_opinion_experience_what_are_main_reasons_of_rejecting_a_manuscript_by_international_journal_reviewers

When a paper is ambiguous with its sections in conflict, blurring understanding.

When a paper's methodology that shows how the research was conducted is not consistent with the findings and discussions.

When a paper is outside the scope and aims of the journal.

When the work is badly bad

Useful link:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/In_your_opinion_experience_what_are_main_reasons_of_rejecting_a_manuscript_by_international_journal_reviewers

I did not suggest rejection of a manuscript based on the first review unless:

(1) It is clearly not original, or

(2) It contains severe errors, or

(3) Its content is irrelevant to the journal scope.

Otherwise, I provide sufficient feedback to the authors for enhancing and/or correcting their manuscript.

Hi,

Usually, the first editorial consideration is if the paper is in the aims and scope of the journal. If the editor thinks it is not, he could reject it without even sending it to referees. Accepting an article depends on its value, how much it adds knowledge to the field, and to what extent it follows journal's "instructions for authors". An article is accepted with minor revisions usually when there is a missing citation, or if there are language problems, or if the communicative way of transferring ideas is not clear. Major revisions are required if the general idea of the paper is novel, but the presentation needs a lot of revisions. A complete rejection after reviewers examination is when the paper is definitely below the accepted scientific level of the journal.

I agree with the views of Dr subash

Most of the time manuscript is rejected when the editor does not find reputed co-author in the manuscript. I have seen so much rubbish(repeating) work being published by Elsevier and Springer just because the manuscript is co-authored by the reputed author.

Many of us would say that if the manuscript is co-authored by reputed author then it surely would contain original work but I bet, it is not always true...

I recommend a scientific document be rejected for publication in a mathematics journal that I work as a reviewer, when it lacks originality, lack of clarity in presentation and proper sequencing of results and when results or the topic of the article is outside the domain of discourse of the journal.

Thanks for all of the valuable answers from different perspectives. As a reviewer, I usually put myself in other's shoes in trying to find their good points from the manuscript before making my decision to reject it from my first screening. The authors usually try their best to make their manuscript as complete as possible. However, in several cases, they might fail to completely and clearly present their new ideas/ findings in their first version. When we are invited to review a manuscript, it must meet some basic criteria of the journal in terms of scope, technical format, etc. before it is sent to us. Therefore, unless the manuscript is poorly written or carelessly prepared or has severe errors in their fundamental literature, I think it's worth offering them a chance to discuss and improve their manuscript; so that we can get "a diamond from the sand" as mentioned by Mercedes in previous answer.

When there is fundamental flaw in the paper. It shows that paper is not correct in the basic principles -

First, Scope of the journal

Second, Concept wise flaw

Third, Quality and clarity of writing

Fourth, No contribution to Academic or Practitioner

Fifth, structure of the paper not meeting the required guidelines

these are the things one need to consider before submission, else high chance of receiving rejection, major revision, and minor revision...

I want to turn perspective to further contribute to this discussion (and because most points for rejection are already mentioned):

"Which problems in a paper would you accept and only comment in a first review round to not get rejected?" We all agree, that if an article has fundamental method errors or is over-interpreting its results or does simply not fit to the journal, then it is rejected.

But what if "only" the language and style is bad or the narrative of reasoning is not clear? Or only some aspects of the method are intransparent and you need more info? Or the authors fail to formulate clear implications or conclusions? If the author does not see the core limitations? etc pp.

When I do reviews, this is the normal case, that papers do not have extreme failures, but are "somehow" weak and authors need guidance what to do. This is why I perceive the role of a reviewer not as a quality control but as a coach or trainer.

So a rejection for me comes, if it is not possible to improve the paper to journal standards in a considerable amount of time, because method, empirics, data or other challanges are so severe.

As a reviewer, I've recommended rejection on 6 papers.

1. Two of them had no clear scholarly contribution at all and I was surprised they got past the desk editor

2. One was a "follow-up paper" from a paper written by the same authors 15 years before and the question/approach they presented has long been discussed and settled in the literature (and there was no real literature review in the paper) - I know the main professor who answered the question so I know that a good answer exists

3. One was a study that looked like the three authors had just written different sections and dumped them together in a way they didn't fit - it did not follow any of the relevant standards nor had any clear description of their methods or experiments. This was the only paper I've seen where all three reviewers said reject after one review.

4. One case where I recommended rejection because the authors did not seem to understand the topic and were making exaggerated claims with only a small amount of evidence. There were four reviewers on that paper, two said reject and two said major revision - the editor decided to give them a chance to revise the paper before rejecting it. They ended up adding another author who rewrote the paper and made it much better after three rounds of revision - it ended up getting accepted after a long revision cycle.

5. One obvious plagiarism case that the journal investigated and banned the corresponding author (the other "authors" did not know about the paper)

If the paper is outright bad, I will reject it. If it is fixable, the difference between minor and major revision is generally the amount of time I think it will take for the authors to address the concerns adequately.

To my knowledge, rejecting or accepting a manuscript is in Editor's hands, but editors generally don't go against reviewers' comments and suggestions. What they generally do is if reviewer's comments are strongly negative, they send the manuscript to other reviewers for review in hope of positive response. Reviewer's generally recommend accept after minor or major revisions. In rare cases when 'fraud' and 'plagiarism' is suspected by the reviewer (which the editor has missed), the reviewer rejects.