This trend started several years back from top journals. I have received more than 130 rejections and approximately half of the rejections were anonymous without assigning any reasons. However, this practice is required by top journals due to the following reasons.

(1) The number of submissions increases every year. This will increase the work load for reviewers. Increased submissions may cause difficulty in finding appropriate reviewers.

(2) The top journals run with fixed editorial board. The time of editors is precious. It is impossible for them to handle all submitted manuscripts till the end of review process. In my opinion, if all the submitted manuscripts are to be reviewed, the journal should induct at least 50-75 editors.

(3) Top journals are not increasing the number of issues per annum at the same rate of increased submissions.

In my observation, the following factors could be the reason for anonymous rejections.

(1) The authors had published similar papers in the same journal previously.

(2) Editors mostly read abstract and conclusion sections before deciding to pass it to review process. Any language errors or badly constructed technical sentences may force the editor to press rejection button.

(3) The authors paper may have considerable offset with the current focus or expectation of the journal although the topic falls within the scope of the journal.

(4) Many publications are already made in the same area in that journal by several authors across the globe.

(5) Top journals filter papers based on novelty not on solid work. Hence, a well written and worked paper may not go to review process.

(6) Reference section should cite significant amount of recent publications. If the citations are decades old, the manuscript will be scrapped.

(7) The author didn't cite a single paper in the journal in which he has submitted. It has been a trend by Editors to ask authors to cite few articles from their journals.

(8) The particular Editor assigned for the manuscript didn't like your reseach area or didn't have adequate knowledge in your field.

(9) No journal declares the percentage of acceptable similarly index explicitly in the journal website or in author instructions. Hence, that rejected manuscript might have crossed the similarly index set by the journal.

(10) The author received rejection with or without review process. He modifies some parts of the manuscript and uploads to the same journal second time from the same account.

(11) The percentage of accepted articles per annum in top journals in my reseach area is approximately 10-20%. 80-90% of submissions are rejected. Editors are under tremendous pressure to reject to limit the accepted articles within the allotted space. This pressure sets their mind in rejection mode even before going through the manuscript. Therefore, if the editor finds a single fault (poor formatting, poor resolution of figures, poor structuring of articles, non uniform reference section etc.)in the manuscript, it instantly leads to rejection before peer review process.

Acceptance in top journals is highly unpredictable. On the other hand, some published articles make you to think how this poor manuscript was accepted for publication in this leading journal. It is also impossible to revoke editors decision by following up in several mails. If they decide to reject, they will do it irrespective of the merits of the manuscript.

Dear Jaroslaw Drelich  , Sir

Thanks a lot for your important question. Really, this situation has become the main trait of many (not all) trusted indexed journals and we are all suffering from. I think the best solution is to be very accurate in selection of the appropriate journal that excellent fit with your specialty and as you know, recently the main factor to evaluate a researcher is NOT publishing in relatively high impact factor journal, never, but how to get more and more citations to improve your h-index.

Hope you full success.

Regards, Emad

Dear Jaroslaw, thank you for the question. In my opinion early rejection is not right , and I am not excluding as you say the top journals. Why should the top journals be an exception? As an editor, it is very important to write the specific aim and the scope of the journal. I have a lot of negative experience, like the aim and scope of the Journal say that it is a journal about all modern languages and every aspect of linguistics. then I submit a paper on pragmatic and then they said: it is not in the scope of the journal and will not have impact on broader audience. Then if you reject the paper it is fer to the author to specify what exactly is not good in the particular paper, the previous mentioned statements are simply not enough. I can not see what is not good in my paper. Then, as an editor, there is a very relevant segment and you should consider it: it is important from where the authors are coming from, the tradition in the country for ex. I come from Macedonia, and as I am PhD in the Macedonian language, it is natural that my paper will concern some problems in the Macedonian language. I have noticed that the Slavic languages have another tradition in writing papers that American and etc. which are more developed. For ex. the qualitative paradigm is not well known area in Macedonia, so when I submit the paper I write as I have wrote my master thesis or my PhD, but according to some editors it is not enough. If it is possibility let people submit in their own languages, I find difficult to express some grammatical forms and examples in English. I have to translate every example in English, even the reference and we all know that the references should be only be given in Latin and not translated. One more thing, most important, when rejecting write sound and clear what is missing or lacking. Hoe that these comments which are in fact my experiences will help ypu to serve as an excellent editor. Wish you luck. 

This is a really important question, and becomes more difficult to deal with when you do research that is truly interdisciplinary. I have been developing some ideas around dissolution, which is a fundamental reaction, important in etching (materials science), geochemistry (weathering), extractive metallurgy (leaching), chemical engineering (wide range of processes), dental (tooth decay), etc. How do I submit to a specialized journal when I need to reach a broad audience? Editors of broad journals have been uninterested, and the quality of reviews at specialist journals has not been good. The reflex reaction is to reject. The stated aim of many funding agencies is to foster interdisciplinary work, but my experience at getting my work published in anything other than a very narrow discipline where I am well-known has been abysmal. 

This trend started several years back from top journals. I have received more than 130 rejections and approximately half of the rejections were anonymous without assigning any reasons. However, this practice is required by top journals due to the following reasons.

(1) The number of submissions increases every year. This will increase the work load for reviewers. Increased submissions may cause difficulty in finding appropriate reviewers.

(2) The top journals run with fixed editorial board. The time of editors is precious. It is impossible for them to handle all submitted manuscripts till the end of review process. In my opinion, if all the submitted manuscripts are to be reviewed, the journal should induct at least 50-75 editors.

(3) Top journals are not increasing the number of issues per annum at the same rate of increased submissions.

In my observation, the following factors could be the reason for anonymous rejections.

(1) The authors had published similar papers in the same journal previously.

(2) Editors mostly read abstract and conclusion sections before deciding to pass it to review process. Any language errors or badly constructed technical sentences may force the editor to press rejection button.

(3) The authors paper may have considerable offset with the current focus or expectation of the journal although the topic falls within the scope of the journal.

(4) Many publications are already made in the same area in that journal by several authors across the globe.

(5) Top journals filter papers based on novelty not on solid work. Hence, a well written and worked paper may not go to review process.

(6) Reference section should cite significant amount of recent publications. If the citations are decades old, the manuscript will be scrapped.

(7) The author didn't cite a single paper in the journal in which he has submitted. It has been a trend by Editors to ask authors to cite few articles from their journals.

(8) The particular Editor assigned for the manuscript didn't like your reseach area or didn't have adequate knowledge in your field.

(9) No journal declares the percentage of acceptable similarly index explicitly in the journal website or in author instructions. Hence, that rejected manuscript might have crossed the similarly index set by the journal.

(10) The author received rejection with or without review process. He modifies some parts of the manuscript and uploads to the same journal second time from the same account.

(11) The percentage of accepted articles per annum in top journals in my reseach area is approximately 10-20%. 80-90% of submissions are rejected. Editors are under tremendous pressure to reject to limit the accepted articles within the allotted space. This pressure sets their mind in rejection mode even before going through the manuscript. Therefore, if the editor finds a single fault (poor formatting, poor resolution of figures, poor structuring of articles, non uniform reference section etc.)in the manuscript, it instantly leads to rejection before peer review process.

Acceptance in top journals is highly unpredictable. On the other hand, some published articles make you to think how this poor manuscript was accepted for publication in this leading journal. It is also impossible to revoke editors decision by following up in several mails. If they decide to reject, they will do it irrespective of the merits of the manuscript.

I Dinahran above has provided a pretty comprehensive list of reasons for rejection without external evaluation of submitted papers. Those problems are quite real for the editors and journals. In my experience of many years of teaching research writing I came across many researchers who knew their papers will not be accepted in some the prestigious journals but submitted anyway in order to get feedback from experts in the form of peer review.  With high IF journals paying their external reviewers, the editors are being more restrictive in what papers they send for review. In the last 20 years the both the number of papers and journals have increased exponentially. Hence, the problem.

I appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. I agree with everything what was described so far. I also agree that Dinahran provided very detailed list of motivations behind rejections.

What really frustrates me recently are the rejections without any reasoning and justification. I was lucky in my career and had very few rejections made by the editors during their early evaluation of manuscript, typically in a few days after submission. This changed in the last 4-5 years. Now, I need sometimes to go through 2-3 journals to receive evaluation of manuscript by the external referees. I have no problem with rejection by one editor as long as it is done timely and explains reason of his/her decision. As the editor by myself, I do the same. I provide at least short justification why the manuscript cannot go through external evaluation in my journal. There are many reasons as Dinahran pointed out well. 

However, I have two examples that make me really disappointment.. One when editor in one of the extremely high IF agreed to accept my manuscript for evaluation and after nearly one year decided not to evaluate it. I will not go through details but generally he lost submission, then promise to review it two times and after my third intervention (after about year) decided by himself that he will not consider paper in his journal.

Second case happened just a few days ago. Without any reasoning the editor announce that we should submit our manuscript to other journal, Major problem was that he already hold the manuscript for entire month, without selecting external referee, so we lost entire month for nothing.

Anyway, early rejection by editors are perfectly fine but they should provide some at least general justification for such a decision. The editors should also be more flexible as they make mistakes too, To support this statement, two of my highly cited papers were not welcomed by the editors at first. After some discussion and dispute these papers were evaluated and published. They remain highly cited, and one of them is marked by Thomson Reuters as in top 1%,  I could give more examples when I move some of my manuscripts from one journal to another and sometimes to 3rd or 4th one. They are well cited in spite of opposite prediction of editors.

I think that we have reached, or about to reach, the point when journals are flooded by editors with high ego but narrow field of knowledge and vision.

Jaroslaw, I also had few little difficulty getting papers published in the past, and several has achieved significant numbers of citations, many over 100. But in the last five years, this has changed. Reviewers are seem to be reviewing to a narrow set of criteria, and without a view to the paper's contribution to the scientific debate. Ultimately, all work in science is provisional, subject to new evidence as our knowledge builds. Activating a reject button too early by either editors or reviewers does not justice to the enterprise of science.

It is not justified to reject any work without a reason. Editors should appreciate the efforts of every researcher. Actually, the biggest problem is with us young upcoming researchers. We have flaws and we can only grow if the top journal editors contribute towards this growth-advancement of science will be possible iff we help the next generation in the line of research.

But, my biggest nightmare is why most of these journals have to keep researchers articles for a whole year or even more in the name of reviewing!! I think those of you in this forum and are editors, you should be quick in getting feedback to researchers from reviewers. The maximum, for any considerate reviewer, time for be 2.5 months; the researcher needs to know the fate of their contributions-whether is being challenged or it is sensible for the world to read. If a reviewer does not return after 1 or two months, they should be contacted and requested to give a feedback; otherwise, the article should be given to a reviewer who can do better.

This is a very nice discussion. I would like to echo with many of your views that it is not the length of time that is taken/needed for the editorial process but the rationality in the decision making process should be given more importance. I guess, that makes the whole process scientific.

There are indeed hundreds of rational reasons to reject a paper and the rejections can be viewed as justified. But when the editorial decision is completely irrational and unjust (which is becoming common now a days), it is unacceptable and there should be mechanism to record such activities.

I dont see any reason to hide or ignore (or support) the unjust decision in rejecting a manuscript by certain Editor or Editor-in-Chief. While the rate of rejection is adding value to their (journal) reputation (as it is counted for indexing by authorities such as Web of Science).