Desk rejection with Katie Witkiewitz

In this episode, Dr Casy Calver talks to Dr Katie Witkiewitz about her experience as an editor and specifically about desk rejection – sometimes called ‘reject without review’. Katie describes some of the reasons that articles are rejected without going to peer-review, including there being too many similar studies already in the journal, page limits, articles being outside the scope of the journal, (avoidable) issues of quality. She then gives her top tips for how best to avoid and cope with desk rejection.

"You know, I think in the stress and strain of getting a paper out you don't re-read it in its entirety often, right? It's been through a lot of edits, maybe you were just frantically getting it in the journal format in the last minute you made some changes to get it in under word-count. But you didn't take a step back and re-read it."

Dr Katie Witkiewitz is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Center on Alcohol Substance Use and Addiction at the University of New Mexico, as well as the Editor of the journal Psychology and Addictive Behaviours.

This episode was originally published on 19 March 2024 as part of a limited series on the Addictions Edited podcast.

Publishing Addiction Science is produced by the International Society of Addiction Journal Editors (ISAJE) and the Society for the Study of Addiction (SSA). The podcast was inspired by the book, "Publishing Addiction Science", which is a comprehensive guide for addiction scientists facing the complex process of publishing in scholarly journals.

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