The Buttheaded Editor: On Your Cover Letter to the Journal

Your cover letter matters. Since its inception, JBR has given remarkable powers to the Editor-in-Chief. I desk reject 70-80% of submissions (a remarkably stable statistic over the history of the journal). After fielding almost 150 new submissions to JBR since taking the reins in January, I have read some great cover letters that have kept hope alive for papers that went out for review, revision, and, ultimately, publication. Other authors have submitted manuscripts with no cover letter or a vague letter that misses the point of writing to the editor. To avoid being a butthead (not the 17th-century reference to a blunt object, not the 1950s term for a horned farm animal, but the 1980s pop term for an objectionable person, as in “Beavis and Butthead”), I must then use other resources to decide if a review is merited. Here are a few thoughts for those who are about to write their first or hundredth cover letter for JBR (preferably) or elsewhere.

This issue of JBR includes a great guide to writing a cover letter by Dr. Michael Rosbash, a member of the JBR Editorial Board and a highly decorated scientist. His shared wisdom focuses on how to get your paper into journals where editors need convincing about the significance, innovation, and broader impact of the science. I largely agree with his take-home messages: Be brief (bullet), interesting (celebrate the new and important), bold (convince the subjective editor to do the objective right thing—send this out for review), personal (politely see the Editor as a fellow traveler in this endeavor), and confident (upload your preprint to BioRxiv—now with a direct submit button to JBR!). He also has advice you don’t need at JBR; he suggests reviewers to the Editor. My job (and joy), according to the publisher, is to find unbiased reviews without nominations from the authors. So where SAGE requests you enter potential reviewers for your manuscript, don’t. It’s a trap. Read on, if you wonder how I choose reviewers.

“Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” This famous line from the absurdist play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard (1937-2025) stuck with me when I saw it performed this year in St. Louis. It is relevant here to us as authors and reviewers because it captures our existential dread of being trapped in a narrative beyond our control. As authors, you have the cover letter to steer the narrative. After I scan your title, abstract, list of authors, and figures, I have a sense if the paper is timely, by real scientists among whom we can expect some authority on the topic, and includes new data presented in an interesting format. Without the cover letter, I must make my own bullets about the rigor and relevance of the work. With a cover letter, you can remind me how this overcomes historical challenges in the field, builds on prior publications in the journal, or adds to the communal data valued by chronobiologists. Apparently some journals and editors don’t read your cover letter; I do.

I enjoy picking reviewers. There are many tools these days for finding reviewers. First, know that I never upload your paper into q.e.d. or other AI-based tools for guidance. I am working to ensure that reviewers also never use AI in generating their critiques. Instead, I start with our exceptional Editorial Board of over 70 experts from many scientific disciplines and backgrounds. I use your cover letter, keywords, bullets, abstract, bibliography, and so on to identify experts (Google Scholar, PubMed, . . .) who will be interested in your work. JBR requires at least two substantive reviews for every publication so sometimes I go through as many as a dozen potential reviewers from all over the world to learn who is conflicted, unavailable, too busy, or not responding to their emails. So far, I am impressed by how many folks quickly agree to review. Even more surprising for me, I enjoy summarizing their major and minor concerns to make it clear to all of us what would be required for your publication. More than 90% of papers that go out for review for JBR are ultimately published. I try to communicate to authors the difference between “reject” and “major revisions required.”

For those 10% of papers that are rejected after peer review, some folks do not heed my full advice (e.g. you need to collect more data), resubmit, and then receive my best, buttheaded, response. No one has called me a butthead yet, but one came close. Please know that JBR seeks a high bar, set by the reviewers and editors, past and present. So seek your best words and include a cover letter to the buttheaded editor.