Author: Águeda Delgado-Ponce – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
Rates of acceptance and rejection are expressed in percentages and reflect the relationship between the number of articles submitted to a journal and those that are finally accepted. These rates are an indicator that must be taken into account when selecting the journal in which to publish our work, especially if our contribution is of high quality and is willing to compete with the best studies and research. For this reason, the journals with high rejection rates should not be avoided since they represent, without a doubt, the most prestigious and excellent publications. High-impact publications are, of course, the ones that receive the most work because every prestigious researcher wants to disseminate their work in the journals with the highest visibility, diffusion and impact in the scientific community and which are therefore the most recognized by the research accreditation agencies in all countries. A 20% of the journals currently being edited receive 80% of the jobs, a figure that increases in Social Sciences where the journals present in the most prestigious international databases (JCR or Scopus) are less. This fact leads to high rejection rates, reaching, in some cases, an index of around 90-95%.
However, although our article can be rejected by estimating this proportion, we must keep in mind that good journals are transparent and fast, and the texts, incorporating the proposed improvements, can continue their pilgrimage through other journals without their studies being expired. It is recommended, moreover, if there is the dreaded rejection, not to replicate with the magazine, because in many occasions the value of the article is not being questioned, but, as mentioned above, it is a structural question, only 5% or 10% of the works received can be published. So it is more reasonable and positive to opt for another publication of the almost 30,000 journals that exist in these prestige indexes.
Therefore, if we take into consideration the acceptance and rejection rates for the choice of the publication to which to send an article, it should be evaluated not only in probabilistic terms but as an indicator of their impact where the works that have appeared have had a Competition and are strictly selected, in contrast to those journals with very low rejection rates, where it can be said that almost everything that comes in is accepted, with the consequent discrediting of published articles.
