The editor-in-chief of a magazine with more contributions may have to review dozens of papers a day. The cover letter provides a very good window, which enables the editor-in-chief to quickly understand the main contents and innovations of the papers being reviewed, and then decide whether to send the papers for review. The editor-in-chief's mood for handling manuscripts is exactly the same as your mood for correcting 300 assignments.
Provide the main information of the paper. This can be seen as a simple summary of manuscript and paper delivery. In the cover letter, you need to provide the author information, the title of the paper, the main content of the paper, the innovation of the paper, the potential reviewers (options, according to the requirements of the magazine) and so on. These all need to be clear at a glance.
Provide information statement to the publishing house. Most publishing houses are profit-making organizations, and they don't want any disputes. In order to avoid these disputes, some information needs to be declared by the author, such as originality, financial support, no repeated submission, no conflict of interest and so on. The specific information required depends on the requirements of the publishing house, and we will provide a list of the main information later in this article.
Main misunderstandings in writing cover letters;
First, copy the abstract as it is.
In order to save trouble, many authors copy the abstract of the original paper directly to make a cover letter. This is a very offensive behavior of the editor, and it also partly reflects the author's attitude of not paying attention to this submission, leaving a bad impression on the editor.
Second, there are too many technical terms.
For an editor, although they are all "battle-hardened", they have seen all kinds of manuscripts. However, every editor has his key research field. The so-called "interlacing is like a mountain", and the manuscripts in other fields may not be understandable, so this reflects that the cover letter needs easy-to-understand sentences to better express opinions.
Third, there are too many details in the paper.
The purpose of the cover letter is not to discuss the details of the paper. Please refer to the original paper for details. Too many grammatical mistakes. This mistake is the most fatal, because if a cover letter contains too many grammatical errors, it is easy for editors to suspect that the full text of the paper also contains many grammatical errors, resulting in rework or even rejection.
Fourth, exaggerate the significance of the paper.
The meaning of the paper needs to be objectively described in the cover letter, and it is easy to doubt the rigor of the paper behind it by exaggerating the meaning of the paper. Every editor needs to review a large number of papers every day, and the function of a cover letter is to let the editor quickly understand the main contents and innovations of the paper. If the cover letter is too long, it will lose its original function and significance.