TY - JOUR T1 - How editors think about paper submissions, and an announcement JF - Tobacco Control JO - Tob Control SP - 1 LP - 2 DO - 10.1136/tc-2022-057862 VL - 32 IS - 1 AU - Ruth E Malone Y1 - 2023/01/01 UR - http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/32/1/1.abstract N2 - One of the thorniest parts of being editor-in-chief of a leading journal is having to reject so many papers, knowing how hard the authors worked and how much is involved in a submission. Especially for junior authors with little experience with the publication process, those rejection letters are so unwelcome, but everyone gets them and learns to brush off and go on. Still, when I started as Tobacco Control’s editor-in-chief more than a dozen years ago, I agonised over every single decision. I tried to always personalise the rejection letter and still do (we work from a form letter, given our volume of submissions) but I know from personal experience how deflating it can be to get those emails.Determining what to reject outright, what to send out to review and what to reject after review is still sometimes excruciating for me, but since our senior editorial team meets every 3 weeks we have an opportunity to talk over manuscripts that any one of us feels unsure about. How do we decide? Several things factor into our decisions even before a paper goes out for peer review.First, we ask ourselves whether this work is clearly within the scope of the journal and will be of interest to our global readership. Tobacco Control began as a journal publishing a wide range of tobacco control-related work, but across the last 30 years of publication, we have increasingly focused on contributions that address policy and systems. Thus, papers reporting small local studies of smoking cessation or evaluations of educational programmes, no matter how worthy the programmes, will not … ER -