A 5-Step Template for Journal Cover Letters (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: If you've ever stared at the cover letter box during journal submission and thought, what am I actually supposed to put here? You're not alone. This step trips up even experienced researchers. And advice out there is conflicting. Some say, don't worry about it, the cover letter doesn't matter at all. Where others will give you advice to say, it's crucial to get right. But what I see in practice when I look at researchers' cover letters is they often do one of two things. Either paste in a generic copy-paste template, or they write a long, detailed summary. Both feel like sensible approaches, and both completely miss the point of the cover letter. So in this video, what I'm going to do is share with you a customizable template that you can use now and forever. And we're going to go through real examples before and after of using this template so you can feel confident in applying it. It's going to show you how to write short, punchy cover letters in less than five minutes that's going to do the job that they're supposed to do. If you're new to this channel, I'm Professor David Stuckler, and I've published over 400 peer-reviewed papers and served on numerous editorial boards where I've seen literally thousands of cover letters and seen what works and what doesn't. This channel is all about the strategies that will help you publish faster using our systems. And if you'd like to see what those systems could do for your research team and projects, click the link below and let's see if we're a good fit to work together. Now let's dive straight in. So what is the purpose of the cover letter? Well, it's not a summary of the paper. It's a highlight reel. It is plain English marketing to help the editors make one critical decision. Should they send your paper out for review or not? And so you don't want to persuade them that your paper is methodologically perfect at this stage. You just want to convince them that they need to allocate their scarce editorial resources to send your paper out. And remember, about 80 to 90% of papers are getting desk rejected. And that's important because it's getting incredibly hard for editors to find papers. To find peer reviewers for papers. I've seen an estimated recently that it takes about 18 or 19 invites just to find one peer reviewer for a paper. And they often need two, three, maybe even four or five peer reviewers. So that is a heavy burden and editors have an incentive to reject you. So your cover letter goal is to cut through the noise and show the editors to persuade them that your paper is worthy and has a chance of making the cut. Flashing to a recent live session we had with Professor Martin McKee, who is the editor of the European Journal of Public Health. He said this. In your experience, how much weight does the cover letter carry?

[00:02:32] Speaker 2: You know, this comes down to the editor, frankly. And some editors read them, some don't read them. I have to say I never put terribly much weight on them because, you know, by reading the abstract and so on, I usually had a good idea. Obviously, people are going to push them. You know, I think given that you don't know what the editor is going to do, I think putting a bit of effort into it is worthwhile doing.

[00:02:53] Speaker 1: And so the message here is if your letter takes a lot of effort to decode by the editor, it doesn't help you. It just gets ignored. But you miss out on the chance of the healthy boost that a cover letter can potentially bring you. So what I want to do next is show you the structure we actually do that helps achieve this purpose in the best possible way to optimize your chances for getting sent out. And I've seen this work for papers that have been desk rejected over and over and over to flip a switch to suddenly get past that critical first hurdle. So here's the five-part plan structure that we've got. And part one, your first paragraph is usually very simply, very confidently saying, we're pleased to submit our manuscript to the journal, title X, whatever the title is. Setting a professional tone, no, please, maybe, apologizing, hope you'll consider, just strong, professional, courteous tone, straight to the point. Then we get straight to the second point. And straight to it. No fluff here. Get right to the gap. Why does anybody care? Plain English. Check your English with Chet GPT and make sure it has at about an eighth to 10th grade reading level. You do not want a high, very specialized technical reading level here because people might not be in your field. And they're also looking at this just at a glance very quickly and need to get the point. Bring that reading level down. Bring down the technicality in your cover letter. What you need here is to articulate the gap, the debate, and the value out of your paper very succinctly. This is going to sync with your background section of your abstract and your introduction and where you're making the case for why your paper matters. If you don't have clarity on your gap and that's not already crystallized in your paper, your cover letter is not your biggest problem right now. But this second short paragraph, not even necessarily a paragraph. It could even be one sentence or two. I like to use a question here because editors respond quickly saying, ah, that's the question this paper is going to ask. Or the one claim it's going to make can work incredibly well. Remember, less is more in the cover letter. So now that the editor can see that there's a real conversation here, something that fits in the conversation that their journal is having, you need to get very quickly to part three, which is what you found and why it matters. That's the core of the persuasion that your paper has prospects to getting accepted in the journal. So again, in plain English, you just need to use our did plus found formula and say what you did, what you found, and what it means. Highlight real. Not all the results tucked in, just the headline. Think almost, almost. You don't want to write bullet points, but almost as if they were bullet points of what this study adds. Again, it's just enough for the editor to see this is solid, this is relevant, and this is potentially publishable in my journal. Then we get to part four, which is a very quick remind of why you think that journal is the right fit. Remember, this is our defense here against the two reasons for desk reject, that the editors don't think it's a good fit for their journal and they don't see big substantive novelty. Well, we've taken out the novelty point. This is going to be reminding them about the fit. Very subtly, again, don't overdo it, but just a very simple line saying we believe this is going to be of interest to your journal because. And this is where a lot of people fail because they either skip over it or they just write something generic. And so the editor senses, well, this could go to any journal or maybe it's better for a specialist journal. It really doesn't belong here. You're more likely to get desk rejected. Finally, part five. Again, the goal here is to make it as easy as possible for the editor to work with your paper. So we recommend putting in the cover letter three friendly reviewers. Again, they should be friendly. There's a problem if you recommend a reviewer and they're scathing, the editors are expecting these reviewers to be sympathetic because you proposed them. So I like to put it in the cover letter because it makes it easier for the editor. Just three reviewers, names, affiliations, email addresses, just makes things easier potentially for the editor to process. This is optional. I could go either way on this because it does run a little bit of a risk of looking boiler plate. So the editors just ignore it because you're putting in content that's elsewhere, lives elsewhere in the submission process. But on balance, I found it on the editorial side myself to be helpful. Editors do expect you to recommend reviewers. It helps them and it increases the chance that your paper actually gets sent out. Finally, it's worth noting what not to do. Don't place boilerplate text that's sometimes asked for in the submission process. If you do, put it below your signature. So these are things like, I confirm the manuscript hasn't been published elsewhere and it's independent and all the authors have agreed to it. Again, that boilerplate is just going to trigger that gestalt in the editor to gloss over this. This is not important for me to process the submission. It adds friction. So move it below the signature or often put it in the manuscript itself, which is where it's supposed to live. Of course, always check the journal submission guidelines. But again, cut any boilerplate copy and paste text that just bloats cover letters and gets them glossed over. Again, the payoff to all this is not that the editor is going to think, amazing paper, we should publish it right away. They might. That would be amazing. But instead, they're really deciding send out or not send out. So you want them to think, yes, clear, relevant, worth sending out, not going to waste our editorial resources. And that's the purpose of the cover letter. So let's look at a real example. And I have a before and after example with names anonymized here from a paper that kept getting desk rejected. And we tweaked it to optimize its prospects. And it flipped the switch overnight. So I'm going to show you before and after of how you could do this. So let's take a look. So first thing, this is about a page and a half. I've seen some of these that can be three, even five pages, way too long. Get everything into one page only. Second, let's look at the top. Don't need this boilerplate top stuff. I would just get rid of this and make things simpler. I do like that they address the editors by name. That's not a bad thing to do. Just increases the chance they get sent out. First sentence here. Good that it has the title. But this is a little bit weak. Please consider our manuscript. A little bit pleading. I prefer more the language of we are pleased to submit our manuscript entitled this. And you can cut out some of the fluff here. I'll show you the edits in a second. Second paragraph. You have to think about your journal conversation and audience. This is leading with restless leg syndrome, which is not really the way to lead. Because this is not something that obstetricians and gynecologists, in this case, are probably thinking about or debating heavily. It's going to come across as a niche topic. So I would reframe this and get straight into a hook that's a live conversation in their journal. This is also way too long, just on the surface of it. Make this simpler. And the language is written at a level that is too complicated. We want to bring that reading level down and make it simpler. I'll show you again the changes in a second. We'll go through these side by side. And they need to get straight to the point. This is not really exactly exciting or something that the editor is necessarily for. A very top-tier journal. I mean, if you're submitting to a top-tier journal, you need top-tier findings. You need something powerful, important that they want to send out. And this is just a little bit in the did plus found formula. Also just a little bit vague. We examined some associations and we found that there was an association. Is this a big association? A little association? Is this meaningful? And then another paragraph trying to say that it's meaningful. The first large-scale study to examine these associations in a pregnant population. And there is a concern. So there is some good stuff in here. It's just not presented in as compelling a way as it can be. And it's also kind of dropped in some implications for policy here, but in a weak way. And it also combined this to the point, this point here of why it might fit with the journal. I would make this a separate paragraph. I would split this off and I would shorten this considerably. Now we get the boilerplate text. This is all stuff we could potentially cut. It lives elsewhere. I think this is, we hope you will find this is this kind of pleading language that's a little bit soft can get rid of this. You just say, thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, I also like to say something subtle on behalf of the study team. Not necessary, but a subtle tweak. So let's take a look at how I actually tweak this. I'll walk you through my edits using our template. And I've dropped the template below that you can use for your papers. That's going to really help you. But I wanted to show you this five-part framework in action. So let's look at the markup version. What you can see is I trimmed it considerably, even to half a page. I made the language more confident. Like I said, straight to the journal. And I asked a question here that framed it right to their conversation. So I said, your guidelines, in this case, your journal's guidelines recommend pregnant women do this. But could it have an unintended side effect? This is a draft. So this is not perfectly polished. I actually intentionally wanted to show you a draft and edit to see how this reworked into a final version that got sent out. This is not the actual final version. I've kept that elsewhere. But you get the idea. And then you get straight in. So here you get straight into the research question. Even this might have been a little bit long. But to say that this is plausible, that there could be this link. It's been shown in other populations, but hasn't yet been looked in pregnant women. And a reminder that this could be substantial. That the prevalence is high. That this is really relevant to their audience. We changed the language in describing the study to emphasize strength. So not vague stuff on just associations, but that we used a stronger design. We had a cohort. And what we found, we needed to slot the magnitude in here. And something, again, that this was robust and believable. Again, with a view to putting our highlight reel in here and convincing the editors to send it out that this would be methodologically sound. So not all the details of every robustness check we did. But enough to show them that this is solid. And again, we had a little line about this. Of why this would appeal to a general readership. And then we follow it with some recommendations for reviewers as follows. So this is the template that you want to follow and lead into. And I've linked it below so that you can tap into it and take advantage of it for yourself. Listen, if you found this helpful and you'd like to tap more into our research systems to accelerate your own work. Cut the fluff and save you a ton of time. I'd highly encourage you to click the link below. Let's get on a call. Have a quick chat and see if you're a good fit. And see if our approach to research resonates with you. And you're not going to want to miss this next video I've got for you. Which goes through how you can avoid some of the most common reasons papers get rejected with these easy tweaks. Check it out here.