As New Year’s day approaches, take a look back to Peter Tyrer’s words of advice, in 2007, to prospective authors for the British Journal of Psychiatry:
A NEW YEAR MESSAGE TO ALL OUR AUTHORS
No, your failure to have your paper accepted for publication is not because you have offended me or another of the editors. Nor is it because you made rude remarks from the floor about that terrible paper I presented at that international conference, or that we only accept this kind of paper from countries with a gross national product of less than the Isle of Man, or that my institution is in perpetual combat with yours because you open your eggs at the blunter end, or that you missed me out on the invitations to your wedding/inauguration/party/shindig. I have not turned you down because your articles only seem to be written with the apparent intention of discrediting all the research I have ever done, or ever will do, or that I regard qualitative papers as a scientific joke, or that papers on PTSD give me the symptoms of the syndrome, or that I feel your paper is so old hat it should be in Henry Rollin’s section One Hundred Years Ago.
The answer is much simpler. I and my colleagues, in our honest and detached way, have turned you down because we have too little space to publish all the good papers we receive. It is as simple as that.