Thinking About Writing a Cover Letter

Dear Editor,

The advice below was solicited by Mary Harrington a few years ago when she was JBR Editor. I said I would think about doing it and then kept dragging my feet – not quite finding the time or energy to write something coherent. Erik Herzog took up the challenge when he became JBR Editor and finally persuaded me to put pen to paper. I do so somewhat reluctantly – because I’m not sure my advice is valuable for many reasons. Aspects of my career are just not applicable to others, despite and because of my extensive experience (viz. age). I am also relying on memory, as my more recent experience is even more idiosyncratic – because life changes after one has been awarded a Nobel Prize.

Having said this (I have a vague recollection of a Seinfeld episode focused on “Having said that . . .,” but I digress), I need to add here that you’d be surprised by the extent to which my experience mimics yours. Moreover, this is not just me (and you). I was just together with my former RNA colleague Tom Cech (1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), and he was regaling a few people at lunch with his 18-month and three-journal struggle to get a paper finally accepted. His somewhat humorous speculation was that we might have even more trouble than you do (due to large target size?).

In any case, the last CSN (Cell, Science and Nature) paper I published was 10 years ago; this is ignoring an acrimonious Comment published in Science in 2021. I am just not very interested in submitting to these journals any longer. Getting past the editors is difficult for me as well as for you, and then there is too much work afterwards. However, there have been occasions in the past decade when people in my lab want to publish there, and I always try to help them do what they want. I have just been unsuccessful in getting our work past these editors. I have also had trouble getting editors of other journals to send our papers out for review, not always but rather often. Some of this I have managed to overturn on appeal. On other occasions I just give up and move down the journal pecking order. My point here: I am more like you than you might imagine. (And to quote the great Dave Barry, “I am not making this up.”)

On to the advice:

First, there are the obvious things that should appear in a cover letter to the editor. I try to summarize the main conclusions of the paper, obviously in a different way from the Abstract. Sometimes I just do this in the letter with bullet points. Be careful with grammar and proofreading, with your prose more generally. A sloppy letter makes a bad impression. These points are especially important today, because of, and despite, AI.

Second, I try to explain why the editor should pay attention to these conclusions, how they differ from or extend the existing literature in new and/or important ways. Having said “new” and “important,” I need to emphasize that this task is critical and delicate. It is the same task that I and all authors face in their Abstracts and Discussions. How can one highlight the findings without going overboard, without any dishonesty or even excess exaggeration? Honesty is an ethical imperative, but navigation can be difficult. (Another attempt at a humorous tangent: I love the phrase I heard on the radio some years ago: “I live on the edge to give others more room.” However, nothing could be further from the truth. I live on the edge because it is in my nature.)

If one is excessively mute or quiet about how interesting or novel the work is in a new paper, the editors as well as the public at large might not pay attention. Gone are the days when Watson and Crick could use the passive voice and just say, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” Importantly, this British understatement accompanied what was arguably the most important paper of the 20^th century. And, at the risk of appearing to undercut this landmark paper, the MRC (Medical Research Council) and its subsequent LMB (Laboratory of Molecular Biology) had favored status at Nature for a very long time. My overarching and perhaps obvious point here: Publication has a very large subjective component and has changed, which includes today the fact that most journals are concerned with their visibility and profit. Moreover, publishing well has become more difficult: The number of high visibility journals has not increased much, but the scientific enterprise is much larger – meaning demand has increased well beyond supply. Since the quantity and quality of publications are critical to career trajectory, doing this successfully is important, but doing it without a loss of integrity is challenging. As a last point here, a cover letter is not the same as the publication itself. Your papers are a big part of your reputation and legacy; everything said and unsaid is important. A cover letter caries less ethical weight in my opinion.

Third, I always try and engage the editor in some personal way. I recognize that a personal connection is likely a different exercise for me than for many practitioners, especially young people: Why? I know many of these editors personally – or at least have interacted with them in the past, often more than once. And some of them know me, usually for the better (but note: not always). However, often I don’t know an editor at all, and this has become increasingly frequent with time. Many of the people I knew have retired and been replaced by new young people I don’t know at all. As a consequence, I now try and look up where the editor was trained, or something about them or about one of their colleagues. This is so that I can say something that might be memorable in the cover letter, meaning so that they will remember who I am beyond the science in our paper. Even if I just inquire about something, I believe it can help. (“Hey, I see you were trained by X. How did you end up dealing with circadian rhythms in your current position?”)

Fourth, I try to connect outside of my field. For example, this means trying to explain why someone from outside the circadian field or not working in flies should pay attention to this paper. So, avoid being parochial and connect to broader principles. For example, it now looks like fly brain clock neurons are the archetype of most, if not all, central brain neurons, which are also remarkably heterogeneous. Human disease is an obvious touchstone if it is not already in your paper. Journals love this of course.

Fifth, I often suggest experts with whom an editor can touch base, people who can speak to the importance and quality of our submitted paper and work. To bolster these suggestions and just as good scientific practice, I often ask a couple of people in the field to look at our paper prior to publication. And/or ask them whether I can suggest their names to an editor. This can be unreasonably burdensome, asking people to read an about-to-be-submitted paper, but if you speak about unpublished work in a seminar or at a meeting, you can ask people who liked your talk whether you could suggest their name to an editor. One can suggest these same people as reviewers. I always specify whether a potential expert or reviewer has seen the manuscript or not, and I try to suggest people from outside my intimate field, for example, outside flies, to support the general interest of the work.

Editors are often under pressure to reject a substantial fraction of submissions without review and do not really know many areas well, so lowering their energy barrier to asking for an outside opinion about the importance and quality of your work can help.

Sixth, I think paranoia is a bad idea, and it also transmits bad signals to your trainees. In this context, posting on BioRxiv has more benefits than liabilities. More generally, I think theft of science ideas is incredibly rare. And then, there is suggesting referees for your paper: I (almost?) never exclude anyone. I think this smells badly to editors. I have found that even bad faith in reviewing is rare. However, if you are worried about someone being unfair as a reviewer, I suggest you say to the editor in your cover letter that you are not excluding them (because you don’t think that serves your interests or those of the journal), but that you are concerned about their objectivity. That will warn the editor in case that person is chosen and provides an outlier review.

In closing, and at the risk of stating the obvious, resist the temptation to lose your temper when an editor refuses to send your paper out for review – even after appealing. (“I will never, ever submit a paper again to your journal.”) This advice is unnecessary for almost everyone, but I speak from experience; to repeat myself – it was in my nature. Nonetheless, it never worked and only burned bridges. Take a deep breath, wait 24 hours, and then reconsider the email.

Michael RosbashDepartment of Biology and HHMI, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA