Feed URL: One click: Close [ IB : I'm taking the liberty of copying in its entirety Jon Cogburn's post on NewAPPS about submitting papers to journals, because it's worth reading.  He directs it to graduate students - but I think that the same point applies to anyone, especially if they're new to the field in which they're writing.  Since a lot of people writing for journals like the JME - especially on topics in clinical ethics - are medics before they're ethicists, or are coming at ethics from a non-standard direction, I think that the advice is particularly pertinent.] A Plea to Graduate Students Submitting Papers Three times this year a bad thing has happened after I've encouraged editors to give a paper "revise and resubmit." Note that whenever I review a paper and don't recommend immediate acceptance I work really hard trying to help the writer so that their rewrite will to be up to the quality of the journal.  Even when I counsel "rejection" I still try to give detailed constructive advice about how the paper could be recast, even suggesting places the author should send the rewritten paper. So three times this year instead of making the changes I recommended the author resubmitted substantially the same paper and argued with some vehemence that they should not have to change their paper in the ways I suggested.  In all three cases the journal editor had given the paper "revise and resubmit," but then rejected the insufficiently rewritten