A large share of manuscripts are returned before a reviewer reads them, and the reasons are usually procedural: the wrong template, references in the wrong style, figures at the wrong resolution, a missing declaration. That is good news, because procedure is the part you can correct without doing any more research.
What a desk rejection actually means
It does not mean the work was judged and found wanting. It means an editor spent two minutes on it and found a reason to stop. Scope mismatch is one legitimate reason. The others are almost all formatting, and they are avoidable at the cost of an afternoon.
The faults that account for most of them
- The wrong template. Every publisher has one and they are not interchangeable. A paper submitted in the previous version of the same publisher's template is still the wrong template.
- Reference style. Converting between styles by hand introduces errors in roughly every long reference list, which is why it should be done by a reference manager and then checked against the originals rather than trusted.
- Figures. Screenshots pasted into a document arrive at screen resolution and print as mush. Figures need to be produced at the resolution and colour mode the submission requires, which usually means regenerating them rather than resizing.
- Missing declarations. Ethics approval, conflicts of interest, data availability, author contributions. Absent, these stop a submission at the first gate.
- Anonymisation. For double-blind review, the author name has to come out of the file properties as well as the title page. A Word document carries its author in its metadata, and removing the name from page one does not remove it from the file.
What formatting cannot do
It removes reasons to reject. It does not create a reason to accept. Anyone offering the second thing, particularly for a fee and within a guaranteed period, is describing something they cannot deliver.
Check the venue before the template
Before any of this, confirm the journal is one you should publish in. Predatory venues copy the appearance of real ones closely enough that a call for papers tells you nothing, and a paper in a discredited journal is harder to recover from than a rejection, because it is already in print and attached to your name.
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