Academic Journals Editing and Proofreading Services

A journal receives four hundred submissions a year and desk-rejects a hundred and sixty of them. Most of those hundred and sixty were never going to be publishable in this journal, and their authors spent weeks formatting for it anyway — because the scope statement said the journal welcomes high-quality research on organisational behaviour and its consequences, which describes eleven other journals and excludes nothing.

We edit what journals and editorial offices produce — scope and aims statements, desk-rejection criteria and their published form, author guidelines and submission requirements, editorial policies on data, ethics and authorship, reviewer guidance and invitation material, special issue calls and their framing, editorial board and governance documentation, indexing and metrics communications, corrections, retractions and expressions of concern, and author-facing explanations of the editorial process. Our editors work on the statement that tells an author whether to submit.

The scope statement is the highest-leverage paragraph a journal owns, and its failure is describing a field rather than a position. Scope is defined by what a journal turns away, and a statement that excludes nothing does no work for authors or for the editorial office. We work through these so the scope names the questions the journal is interested in and, explicitly, the kinds of paper it does not publish — the single-site descriptive study, the untheorised survey, the replication without a new question, the country-specific case with no comparative frame — since these are the categories that arrive weekly and are rejected without review; so the methodological expectations are stated where the journal has them, because a journal that in practice never publishes qualitative work should say so rather than reject it politely for two years; so three or four recently published papers are cited as exemplars, given that an author can calibrate against a real paper in a way no adjective allows; so the desk-rejection criteria are published as criteria rather than left as editorial discretion, as this is the fastest way to reduce unsuitable submissions; so the difference between this journal and its two nearest neighbours is stated, since authors genuinely cannot tell; and so anything the journal is actively seeking is named. Scope statements written this way reduce the slush and improve the pool.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished submissions, editorial policies and board material. We are editors rather than publishers or academic advisers, and we offer no view on editorial policy, scope decisions or publication standards. What we can do is make the scope say what the journal turns away.