To reduce peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM signals, a self-synchronized-scrambler-based selected-mapping (SS-SLM) has been investigated, where the transmit sequence is scrambled to reduce PAPR. In this method, the receiver needs to use descrambler to recover the original data. However, the descrambling causes error propagation which degrades bit error rate (BER). In this paper, we propose a partially self-synchronizedscrambler-based selected-mapping (PSS-SLM) which scrambles only most significant bits allocated to I-phase and Q-phase of QAM symbols. Numerical results show that the proposed PSS-SLM achieves better BER than that of SS-SLM in QAM-OFDM systems while keeping the same PAPR reduction capability as SS-SLM. , vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 1567-1592, 2013. DOI:10.1109/SURV.2013 J. Armstrong, "Peak-to-average power reduction for OFDM by repeated clipping and frequency domain filtering," Electron. Lett., vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 246-247, Feb. 2002. DOI:10.1049 R. W. Bäuml, R. F. H. Fischer, and J. B. Huber, "Reducing the peak-to-average power ratio of multicarrier modulation by selected mapping," Electron. Lett.,