Most rejected scientific articles don’t disappear. Roughly 60% of papers rejected from a journal eventually get published somewhere else. The journey from rejection to publication can take several different paths depending on how the paper was rejected, what feedback the authors received, and how they choose to respond.
How Rejection Actually Works
Not all rejections are the same. Journal editors typically choose from a spectrum of decisions after evaluating a manuscript. Ranked from best to worst outcome, the options are: accept, accept with minor revisions, revise and resubmit, reject with an offer to resubmit later, and outright reject. Acceptance without any revisions is almost unheard of. The most common recommendation reviewers give is “revise and resubmit,” often abbreviated R&R, which means the paper has potential but needs significant work before the journal will consider it again.
A true rejection, on the other hand, means the journal has closed the door. The editor typically sends an email with the decision and often attaches the reviewers’ reports explaining why. If those reports aren’t included, authors can and should request them, because the feedback is useful regardless of the outcome.
Desk Rejection: Before Peer Review Even Starts
Many papers never reach a peer reviewer. Editors screen every submission first, and a paper can be rejected at this stage for a long list of reasons: the topic falls outside the journal’s scope, the hypothesis is weak, the sample size is too small, the statistical methods are flawed, or the journal recently published something similar. Ethical issues also trigger immediate rejection, including undeclared conflicts of interest, missing ethics committee approval, lack of informed consent from study participants, or suspected plagiarism.
Even basic formatting matters. If authors don’t comply with the journal’s submission requirements or fail to include supporting documents, the paper won’t advance past this technical screening. At top-tier journals, desk rejection is extremely common. Some finance and economics journals reject 85% to 91% of submissions, and referees recommend accepting fewer than 7% of the papers they review.
Here’s what may surprise authors who receive a desk rejection: it doesn’t predict the paper’s future any differently than a post-review rejection does. Data from the Journal of Human Resources found that 58% of desk-rejected papers eventually published elsewhere, compared to 60% of papers rejected after full peer review. The difference is negligible.
What Authors Do After Rejection
The first and most common response is to revise the paper and submit it to a different journal. This is where reviewer feedback becomes valuable even after a rejection. Best practice is to address every single comment the reviewers made, point by point, incorporating the criticism into the revised manuscript. There’s a practical reason for this beyond improving the paper: the same reviewer could end up evaluating the manuscript at the next journal. A reviewer who sees the same unaddressed problems will not be sympathetic.
Authors who receive a “reject with invitation to resubmit” face a strategic choice. A major rewrite takes significant time, and researchers have to weigh whether that investment is worthwhile versus targeting a different journal entirely. If they do resubmit to the same journal, they prepare a detailed response letter listing every reviewer comment alongside their specific changes. Even points they disagree with need a clear, polite explanation of why no change was made.
Some authors take a different approach and highlight the changes directly in the manuscript so editors and reviewers can quickly see what’s been revised. Rushing this process or skipping reviewer comments is one of the fastest ways to collect a second rejection.
Cascading Review and Journal Transfers
Large publishers like Nature, Elsevier, and PLOS have built systems to soften the blow of rejection. When a manuscript is rejected from one of their journals, the publisher may offer to transfer it to a sister journal within the same portfolio. This process, sometimes called cascading peer review, lets the new journal reuse the review reports from the first journal rather than starting from scratch. It saves weeks or months of waiting for new reviewers.
Some initiatives extend this concept across publishers entirely, making peer review “portable.” The idea is that high-quality review work shouldn’t be wasted just because a paper wasn’t the right fit for a particular journal. These systems are still evolving, but they represent a growing recognition that the traditional model, where each journal independently solicits fresh reviews, wastes enormous amounts of reviewer time.
Preprint Servers as a Safety Net
Papers that struggle in traditional peer review have another outlet: preprint servers. Platforms like arXiv (launched in 1991 for physics and now covering mathematics, computer science, and several other fields) and bioRxiv (introduced in 2013 for biology and chemistry) allow researchers to post manuscripts publicly before or after journal submission. One of the recognized reasons for posting a preprint is exactly this situation: the paper was submitted to one or more journals and rejected.
Preprints aren’t peer-reviewed, so they don’t carry the same credibility as a published journal article. But they make the work immediately accessible, establish priority for the authors’ ideas, and allow the broader research community to read and comment on the findings. For some researchers, a preprint ensures their work isn’t invisible while they navigate what can be a long resubmission process.
Ethical Rules Around Resubmission
One thing authors cannot do is submit the same paper to multiple journals simultaneously. This is a firm rule in academic publishing. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) also advises that when resubmitting a previously rejected paper to a new journal, authors should disclose that the manuscript is a resubmission. Not every journal explicitly requires this, but transparency about a paper’s submission history is considered an ethical obligation.
What authors absolutely should not do is submit the rejected paper elsewhere without any changes. Beyond the ethical issues, it’s a missed opportunity. Reviewer feedback, even when it stings, almost always identifies real weaknesses. Papers that incorporate that criticism before resubmission arrive at the next journal measurably stronger, which is a big part of why the majority of rejected papers do find a home eventually.