One important factor to avoid rejection is to decide on the right moment to publish a paper. You have to have enough data to tell a story that is complete, original and interesting, but at the same time, you don’t want to present too much data and overwhelm the reader or wait too long and take the risk to be scooped. A good way to avoid these issues is to decide, before you even start the study, which are the goals you want to achieve and to keep in mind during the process how your paper is going to be and which figures or results it will include. Here are a few other tips that can help you avoid rejection:

• Select very carefully the journal where to send your article. This will help you not only to publish your article more easily, but also more rapidly. Consider all the possible journals; check the scope, past issues, editorials, specialties of the editors and reviewers, impact factor, etc. Everything you can find about the journal might bring you valuable information to finally decide which is the most appropriate for your specific study. Ask your colleagues for their experience, they might have sent articles to the journals you selected or even acted as reviewers.
• Evaluate the importance of your results compared to what is known in the field. If your results are really new and unexpected, they will probably get published faster. When reviewers have to submit their decision, they are usually asked to evaluate the relevance on a scale from 1 to 10. Sometimes, they are also asked if the article should be published directly or if it should be published only if there is space in the journal. The highest rated journals normally publish only groundbreaking articles, so if you are not bringing revolutionary results but a very good study with perfect methodology, maybe a smaller journal would be more suited.
• Make sure the grammar is good. If there are a few typing errors that can be easily corrected by an editor, it might not be a big issue. But if the grammar is really poor, it might interfere with your scientific writing to a point where the results are not well presented or the discussion is not understandable. In this case, this could be sufficient to lead to a rejection of your paper. Accuracy is really important in scientific papers. A misplaced comma could change the whole meaning of a phrase and could be interpreted as a poor understanding of the subject, giving at the same time a bad opinion of your scientific qualities to the reviewers.
• Similarly, make sure that the data is consistent throughout the paper. Double check everything and pay particular attention to the legends and numbers in the tables, making sure they match with those in the text. You don’t want to seem negligent with your results to the reviewers or they might think that you were negligent during your experiments also.
• Ask one or a few colleagues to review the paper. Even if you checked your paper many times, there are still mistakes that you can not see. Additionally, your colleagues can bring you important insight on the paper, with their own experience and criteria. Everyone has different opinions and you can never predict how the reviewers will react to your paper. The only way to estimate the reaction is to observe the reaction of your own friends and colleagues.
• While you write, keep in mind the paper and particularly the tables and figures you want to include. Make sure you present the data in a certain order that is logical and can lead the reader to the same conclusions as you. Try to anticipate which could be the critics from the readers and modify or add the data necessary to avoid them. A great way to evaluate possible critics is to present the results to your colleagues during a lab meeting.