![]() ![]() Don’t go on for pages about what the paper is about and summarize all of your results.The cover letter should be viewed as an opportunity to present useful meta-information about the paper, and not tossed off simply as a submission requirement. Don’t simply reiterate that you have submitted a paper to us and/or copy and paste the title and abstract of the paper.A brief mention of when and where such a conversation occurred can help jog the memory of why we invited the authors to submit it in the first place. ![]() As editors, we meet a lot of researchers at conferences and lab visits and many papers are pitched to us. Do mention if you have previously discussed the work with an editor.For example, known competition with another group’s paper, co-submission to Nature Methods planned with another group, or co-submission of a related results paper to another NPG journal, etc. Explain how it relates, and include copies of the related manuscripts with your submission. Do tell us about any related work from your group under consideration or in press elsewhere.(Please note that the names of excluded reviewers should also be included in the relevant field of the online submission form.) The editors will honor your exclusion list as long as you don’t exclude more than five people if you exclude everyone relevant in a scientific field such that the review process will not be productive or fair, the editor may ask you to shorten the list. This is also the place to list researchers that you believe should be excluded from reviewing the paper. Of course, whether the editor decides to use any of the suggested referees is up to him or her. If the editors decide to send the paper for peer review, providing a list of potential referees, their email addresses, and a very short description of their expertise, can help the editor assign referees more rapidly. Authors should not hesitate to discuss freely in the cover letter why they believe method is an advance (most ideally, backed up with strong performance characteristics in the manuscript!). But editors may not be aware of the nuances of various approaches to address a methodological problem and are more likely to reject a paper without peer review when the advance over previous work is not clear. Many authors are hesitant to compare their work to previous methods for fear that it will appear to reviewers that they are putting down the contributions of other researchers. Briefly explain the novelty and the specific advances over previous work but be realistic about what the method can and cannot achieve. Such a summary is especially crucial for highly technical papers, where the chance that the advance may not be fully appreciated by the editors is often higher. This can include more forward-looking information about potential future applications that authors may be reticent to share with reviewers or readers of their manuscript. ![]() Explain how it will have an impact and why the method and its applications will be interesting to a broad biological audience.
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