Rejection Rates for Journals Publishing in the Atmospheric Sciences

Characteristics of 63 journals publishing peer-reviewed articles on atmospheric science were collected from online information and through a survey e-mailed to the journals. The rate that submitted manuscripts were rejected for publication (hereafter, the rejection rate) was available for 47 (75%) of the journals. Although the range in rejection rates is quite large (2%–91%), most journals reject between 25% and 60% of submitted manuscripts, with a mean of 38.7%, a result of more than 6,000 manuscripts a year rejected for publication. Some journals have a policy of the editor vigorously rejecting manuscripts without peer review, whereas others send either all or nearly all of the manuscripts out for peer review. Measures of journal volume and quality (i.e., number of submissions, number of published articles, number of citations, impact factor, immediacy index, article half-life) show little, if any, relationship to rejection rates, indicating that rejection rates are not higher for journals of higher per...