Writing Successful Covering Letters for Unsolicited Submissions to Academic Journals: Comment

Steven Gump's recent article on covering letters¹ is a potentially valuable contribution. My experience as an editor of fifteen years is that an informative and logically constructed letter of submission generally indicates that the associated paper is also well organized and worthy of consideration. I offer the following comments and ideas on submission as a supplement to Gump's analysis.

Gump is right in suggesting that a letter of inquiry is commonly an unnecessary and even sometimes annoying step for the editor. Often I have found the authors of such communications to be time wasters. Although a positive reply from an editor may give some potential contributors confidence, should we not query the value of a contribution offered with such timidity? There are some prospective authors for whom a letter of inquiry to an editor appears to be the most important part of the process of publication, since, following a positive reply, the manuscript is never submitted. It is as if merely having the title accepted for consideration in principle is sufficient for these 'contributors,' and I can only assume that their curriculum vitae carries this paper as 'in preparation' for perpetuity. Other potential authors will submit, but only after a lengthy correspondence. The advent of e-mail has made such time wasting easier. Although the paper is eventually submitted, it is preceded by a lengthy exchange of correspondence, the author bombarding the editor with questions that either are already answered in the instructions to authors or are unanswerable at that time, such as 'When can I expect to see the paper published?' Let the paper be submitted, reviewed, revised, edited, and accepted - only then I can determine an answer to such a question.

I suggest that Gump's essential components of a covering letter are missing one important section that can both aid and influence an editor. Many journals use one or more external peer reviewers, as is common in the physical and life sciences, for example. When submitting a paper to such a journal, provide the names of three potential reviewers, with their e-mail and postal addresses, in your covering letter. While a journal editor is an expert in his or her chosen field of study, few are omniscient. Providing the names and contact details of possible referees is a quick and easy way of informing the editor exactly where in the field your contribution lies. The editor may not use any of your nominations, but they will nevertheless help in determining who does receive your manuscript and, perhaps, who does not. It is also constructive to explain what skills each reviewer brings to the table: for example, 'X has been publishing in this field for ten years, Y chairs the specialist subcommittee in this area for NSF, and Z, although not a co-author, was involved in the fieldwork for my paper and understands the problem unusually well.'

I also add a suggestion, perhaps obvious in itself, to Gump's insistence that authors pay special attention to the 'Instructions for Authors' of their chosen journal. It is at least as important, perhaps more so, to have a recent copy of the journal itself to hand when writing your paper. 'Instructions for Authors' may detail what the editor wants, but a copy of the journal itself will illustrate what is published; it is not uncommon for the two to be slightly different. If you detect major divergences between the two, then follow the format of a recent issue and explain this, in a sentence, in your covering letter.