Unsubmitted manuscriptsA manuscript is usually unsubmitted by the editor when it fits the journal's scope and meets most of quality criteria, but lacks some required parts and/or might have some issues with format and structure. In the following table we have presented common causes of manuscripts being unsubmitted and the suggested solutions.It is obvious that most of the above-mentioned problems could be easily avoided by reading carefully and following author guidelines published on the IJHG web-site and explained in a series of recent editorials. We fully share the sentiment of a journal editor who wrote: "it never ceased to amaze me how easily authors let their research perish just because they did not read the instructions for authors or wrote an abstract that did not reflect their work" (Carneiro, 2024).When choosing the unsubmit option, editors usually provide specific recommendations to authors about the missing information and point to useful resources and to recently published IJHG articles with similar study design or paper category. Still, we have noticed that many of unsubmitted manuscripts are never submitted again, which could be explained by their originating from paper mills, or by being submitted by authors to other journals (we have found two unsubmitted papers, later published by peer-reviewed journals in 2024).
Desk-rejected manuscriptsIJHG acceptance rate in 2024 was about 22%. When reviewing typical causes for manuscript desk-rejection we have found that very similar causes are stated by editors of other Emerald journals (Shukla, 2024;Newell, 2024;Russo and Wong, 2024), as well as healthcare-related journals from other publishers (Hallas, 2024;Carneiro, 2024). These reasons for rejection could be combined into three main groups: suitability; rigor and novelty. Suitability IJHG promotes the evolution of governance for health and health systems to meet new challenges in the 21st century. Serving a wide international readership, IJHG publishes empirical and theoretical papers that offer national perspectives, international comparisons and global approaches. IJHG presents innovative research and conceptual papers, viewpoints, case studies, evidence synthesis papers and reviews that provide actionable insights for smarter governance.The majority of desk-rejected manuscripts are out of scope of the journal: e.g. epidemiology studies, mortality and morbidity rates, description of medical technologies and devices, professional learning curriculum to improve patient outcomes, bibliometric analysis, health information behavior on social media and similar.
