When to appeal a rejection

Most appeals against a journal rejection fail, and most that fail were predictable. There is a usable test for the difference: an appeal can succeed when it points to a factual error the editor can verify without re-forming a judgement. It fails when it asks the editor to weigh the same evidence differently.

Apply that test before writing anything, because an appeal takes weeks during which the paper is not under consideration anywhere. The test is not a personal heuristic; it is close to the written policy of the journals that publish one, and reading two of those policies before you draft will tell you within a minute whether your case is admissible at all.

What journal appeal policies actually require

Journal appeal policies convert the same test into admissibility criteria, and the clearest published version is PLOS ONE’s, which considers an appeal only where “a reviewer or editor is thought to have made a significant factual error”, or “a reviewer or editor’s objectivity may be compromised due to a documented competing interest”, and where “a reversal based on either of these grounds would change the original decision”.

Read that as a three-part gate. Part one is a factual error, not a disagreement. Part two is a documented competing interest, not a suspicion. Part three is materiality: even a genuine error is not grounds unless correcting it changes the decision. A reviewer who mistakenly wrote that your cohort was retrospective, in a paragraph that did not drive the rejection, fails part three.

PLOS ONE also states that “decisions on appeals are final without exception”, and requires the appeal in writing to [email protected] with a completed Appeal Request Form and the words “Appeal PLOS One” in the subject line. Frontiers adds the limit most authors do not expect: it will not consider an appeal “when one appeal or rebuttal has already been evaluated for the manuscript”, and states that “assessment of all rebuttals and appeals remains at the discretion of the journal and all decisions are final”. Frontiers recognises one ground PLOS does not spell out — a rejection in which “the journal’s policies were misapplied or your adherence was misunderstood”. Frontiers separately refuses appeals resting solely on scope or fit, so this ground reaches only a policy applied to a fact that is not true of your paper.

You get one attempt. Spend it on the strongest single point, not on the longest list.

Appeals that can work

Four situations produce appeals that editors act on, and all four share the property that a third party can check the claim without re-reading the paper as a whole.

A reviewer error of fact. They state your method does something it does not, or that a control is missing when it is in figure S3. This is verifiable in a minute, and editors act on it. The reason it works is procedural rather than persuasive: the editor does not have to agree with you about the science, only to confirm that a stated basis for the recommendation is untrue. Give the figure panel, the page number and the line, so verification takes seconds. If the reviewer’s error is about a statistical procedure rather than a missing panel — they describe your model as unadjusted when Table 3 reports the adjusted estimate — the same rule applies, and the correction belongs in one sentence with the table cited. See reviewer says the wrong statistical test was used for the version of this that is a genuine disagreement rather than an error.

A reviewer misread the prior literature. They assert your finding is already published and cite work that shows something adjacent. If you can state precisely what the cited paper showed and how it differs, the editor can check. Name the citation, quote the sentence from its abstract that the reviewer relied on, and state the difference in one clause — different species, different endpoint, different dose range, a correlation where you report an intervention. This is the appeal most often lost by over-arguing: three sentences comparing two papers are checkable, and two pages defending novelty are a request for re-judgement. The distinction matters because reviewer says this is already known and reviewer says the work is incremental look identical in a decision letter and are not the same objection — the first is a factual claim about a published paper, and only the first is appealable.

A demonstrable conflict of interest or evident bias. Raise it factually, without accusation, and let the editor decide. Editors take this seriously and handle it quietly. Demonstrable means documented: a co-authorship inside the journal’s stated window, a competing submission, shared funding, a commercial relationship with a product your paper evaluates. Write the fact and the date and stop. Do not characterise motive, and do not name whom you believe the reviewer is; editors know, and speculation about identity converts a serious complaint into an awkward one.

A requested experiment that is impossible for a reason the reviewer did not know. The model does not exist, the reagent is unavailable, the cohort is closed. Say so and offer the nearest alternative. Impossibility is a fact the editor can verify — a discontinued catalogue number, an ethics approval that expired, a registry that closed to new extractions on a stated date — and offering the nearest feasible substitute is what turns the appeal from a refusal into a proposal. When the request is for a replication or an additional control rather than an impossible reagent, the appeal is usually weaker than a revision would be; see reviewer wants more controls and reviewer says the experiment was not replicated.

Appeals that will not work

Four families of appeal fail so reliably that filing one spends weeks and returns nothing, and the common feature is that each asks the editor to re-form a judgement rather than to check a fact.

Disagreeing with a significance judgement. “We believe our work is more important than the reviewers concluded” asks for the same evidence to be weighed differently. It asks for the one thing an appeal cannot deliver, and it essentially never succeeds. The editor already read the reviews and formed a view; restating your view adds no new checkable information. The tell is grammatical — an appeal built on “we believe”, “we feel”, “we would argue” and “in our view” contains no verifiable proposition anywhere in it.

Scope. Editorial territory by definition. The one exception is the Frontiers ground above: if the rejection cites a specific policy and you can show the policy was applied to a fact that is not true of your paper — it was called a case series when it is a prospective cohort — that is a factual error about your manuscript, not a scope argument. Everything else in this family belongs at a different journal; see reviewer says the paper is out of scope and choosing a journal.

Reviewer harshness. Tone is not grounds unless it crosses into unprofessional conduct, which is a different complaint made differently. A conduct complaint goes to the editor as a conduct complaint, names the sentence, asks for it to be addressed with the reviewer, and does not ask for the decision to be reversed. Mixing the two weakens both: an appeal that leads with tone reads as an appeal with no factual basis.

New data. An appeal is not a revision. If you have new experiments answering the objection, ask whether the editor would consider a new submission rather than appealing the old decision. That question is short, takes one paragraph to ask, and often gets a faster answer than an appeal — some editors will invite a resubmission with a new manuscript number, which restarts review rather than re-litigating a closed decision. Prepare it as a submission, not as an argument, and treat the old reviews as the specification: this is a response to reviewers attached to a new paper, not an appeal letter with data stapled on.

How to write one

Short. One page. State the specific error, provide the evidence, and say what you are asking for — usually re-review by a different reviewer, or reconsideration in light of the correction.

Do not attach a revised manuscript unless invited. Do not respond point by point to the whole review; that is a revision letter, and sending one signals you are contesting the decision rather than correcting an error.

An appeal letter has five parts and they belong in this order: the manuscript number and decision date; the single point being appealed, named in one sentence; the evidence, located precisely; the consequence, stating why correcting it would change the decision; and the request. Address it to the handling editor by name if the decision letter gives one, and follow whatever channel the journal specifies — PLOS ONE’s policy above requires an emailed Appeal Request Form rather than a reply in the submission system, and a letter sent through the wrong channel can sit unread.

In their second comment, Reviewer 2 states that we did not include a vehicle-only control. This control is presented in Figure S3B and described in Methods, p. 22. We believe this may have affected the assessment of the specificity of the effect, and we would be grateful if the manuscript could be reconsidered on this point.

That is the whole shape. Specific, checkable, and asking for one thing.

Note what the paragraph does not do. It does not argue that the finding is important, does not mention the other three reviewer comments, does not accuse Reviewer 2 of carelessness, and does not exceed one point. Every clause either locates evidence or states a consequence. Keep the whole letter under about 300 words; the editor’s decision is whether to spend a reviewer’s time, and that decision is made on the first two sentences.

Worked example: two appeals, one decision each

Two constructed appeals against structurally similar rejections illustrate what separates them, and the difference is visible in the first sentence of each.

Appeal A, on a genomics manuscript rejected after review: Reviewer 1 wrote that the authors had not corrected for multiple testing across the transcriptome. The authors’ appeal quoted the reviewer’s sentence, cited the Methods page where Benjamini–Hochberg correction at a 5% false discovery rate is specified, cited the supplementary table where adjusted q-values appear for every transcript, and stated that the reviewer’s other two objections were revisable. Length: a little over two hundred words. The editor could verify both citations without an opinion about the biology, and sent the paper to a third reviewer. That is the entire mechanism — see multiple comparisons objections for the substance the reviewer had missed.

Appeal B, on a manuscript rejected after review at the same journal: Reviewer 2 wrote that the mechanism was not established. The authors’ appeal argued across two pages that mechanism is not required for a descriptive report, cited four papers in the journal that also lacked mechanism, and asked the editor to reconsider the significance of the finding. Nothing in it was checkable. The comparison to four other papers is an argument about editorial standards, which is the one thing an editor cannot concede without repudiating their own decisions. The rejection stood. The substance of that objection is real and answerable — in a revision, at a different venue — and reviewer says the mechanism is not shown is where it gets answered.

The two appeals are the same length in effort and opposite in outcome because Appeal A asked a question with a yes-or-no answer and Appeal B asked for a judgement.

What the editor does with your appeal

An editor handling an appeal performs a triage, not a re-review, and understanding that triage tells you what your letter has to survive.

The first question is admissibility: does the letter allege a checkable error, and would correcting it change the decision. That is the PLOS ONE three-part gate, applied in under a minute. Letters that fail it receive a short reply restating the decision, and at Frontiers that reply exhausts your one appeal.

The second step, for letters that pass, is verification. The editor opens the manuscript at the location you cited and looks. This is why precision is not politeness but mechanism: “the control is in the supplement” requires the editor to search, and “Figure S3B, Methods p. 22” does not.

The third step is disposition. Common outcomes are: the decision stands with an explanation; the paper goes to an additional reviewer, with the appeal letter and often the original reviews attached; or the reviewer is asked to comment on the correction. Appeals are not on a fast track, which is where the several-week timeline comes from; journals do not publish appeal turnaround times, so treat several weeks as a planning assumption rather than a policy.

Note that the editor may also consult the original reviewer, who will see your characterisation of their error. Write the letter you would be content for them to read, because they usually will.

The weeks an appeal takes

Appeals run for weeks, and during that time the paper is not under review elsewhere. Weigh that against the probability of success, which for a judgement-based appeal is close to zero and for a factual-error appeal is real but not high.

Make that arithmetic explicit before you commit. An appeal that runs six weeks and fails spends six weeks, plus the days needed to write it, plus the delay to the resubmission you would otherwise have prepared in that window. Against that, the gain from a successful factual-error appeal is not acceptance — it is usually one further round of review at the same journal, which itself may end in rejection. The trade is worth taking only when the error is unambiguous and material, and the alternative venue is meaningfully worse.

The rule against parallel submission is not a convention you can quietly ignore. The ICMJE Recommendations state that “authors should not submit the same manuscript, in the same or different languages, simultaneously to more than one journal”, and an appeal keeps the paper under consideration at the original journal, so the two cannot run in parallel. Posting a preprint is a different act and is generally permitted; check the journal’s preprint policy rather than assuming.

For most rejections the faster and better route is to fix what recurs and submit to a well-matched venue — see rejected after review.

How to find an appealable error in your own decision letter

Finding an appealable error is a reading task with four passes over the decision letter, and it takes about twenty minutes.

Pass one: extract every factual assertion about your manuscript. Go through each review and mark every sentence that states what your paper contains, omits or did. Ignore every sentence that states what the reviewer thinks of it. The marked sentences are the only appealable surface in the document.

Pass two: check each one against the manuscript. For each marked assertion, find the location that confirms or refutes it. Record the exact page, figure panel, table row or line number. An assertion you cannot locate in under two minutes is one the editor will not locate either.

Pass three: test materiality. For each refuted assertion, ask whether the editor’s decision letter or the reviewer’s recommendation rested on it. An error in a paragraph the editor did not quote fails PLOS ONE’s third criterion and is not grounds.

Pass four: check the decision letter against the reviews. Occasionally the editor’s summary attributes to a reviewer something the review does not say, or the decision cites a policy criterion the paper meets. That mismatch is the Frontiers ground — a misapplied policy — and it is easy to miss, because authors read the reviews and skim the editor’s letter.

If passes one to four produce nothing material, you have your answer, and you saved six weeks getting it. Run the same passes on a rejection that came without review before assuming an appeal is available at all; see desk rejected without review.

When the obvious remedy is unavailable

Several common situations remove the appeal route entirely, and each has a different substitute.

The journal permits no appeal, or you have already used yours. Frontiers bars a second appeal outright, and other journals state that appeal decisions are final. The substitute is resubmission elsewhere, carrying the reviews forward as a work list rather than as an argument.

The rejection came without review. A desk rejection contains no reviewer assertions to falsify, so the only appealable ground is a misapplied policy — the paper was declined as out of scope on a description of it that is not accurate. That letter is one paragraph and is better framed as a presubmission enquiry for a corrected reading than as an appeal; see desk screening at scale for why the letter has to be that short.

The journal has no reject decision to appeal. eLife states that “publishing with eLife is different because there is no accept or reject decision after peer review: rather, every article we review is published as a Reviewed Preprint.” Where a journal operates that model, the only editorial decision that can be contested is the decision whether to send the paper for review at all.

The reviewer is right and you cannot fix it here. Where the objection is sound and the required work is out of reach, the appeal is unavailable and the revision is unavailable; what remains is scope. Narrow the claim to what the data support, move the unsupported inference into the limitations section, and submit to a venue whose standard the narrowed claim meets.

A senior author wants to appeal and you do not. Run passes one to three above and circulate the marked-up review. A list of assertions with “confirmed” or “refuted, Fig. S3B” beside each converts a disagreement about pride into a disagreement about a table, and usually settles it.

What editors say when an appeal misses

Editors reply to failed appeals in a small number of recognisable forms. The replies below are constructed composites, not quotations, and each names precisely which part of the gate the letter failed.

“Thank you for your message. The points you raise concern the assessment of the significance of the work, which is a matter of editorial judgement, and I am not able to reverse the decision on that basis.” “The reviewer’s comment that the control was absent appears to be mistaken; however, the decision rested principally on the second and third points, which stand.” “We are able to consider one appeal per manuscript, and this decision is final.” “Your letter reads as a revision; we would be glad to consider a new submission incorporating the additional experiments, which would receive a new manuscript number.” “The competing interest you describe is not one covered by our policy, and the reviewer declared no relationship with the work.”

The second of those is the one worth anticipating, because it is what a real but immaterial error produces. Establishing that a reviewer was wrong is not the same as establishing that the decision was, and an appeal that proves the first while ignoring the second reads to the editor as an argument that has not been thought through.

Related

Why papers get rejected · Rejected after review · Desk rejected without review · How to write a response to reviewers · How peer review works

PerfectPaper reads a manuscript the way a reviewer will and names the objections it expects, so the factual errors that make an appeal winnable are the ones a reviewer never had the chance to make. Expert-led and AI-assisted, PerfectPaper reports where a control, a correction or an adjusted estimate is present but hard to find — the exact condition that produces a reviewer’s error of fact. When the decision is a revision rather than a rejection, the reply you owe is a different document: see a worked response-to-reviewers letter.

Review my manuscript

Frequently asked questions

Should I appeal my journal rejection?

Appeal only if the decision letter or a review contains a factual error about your manuscript that a third party can verify, and correcting it would change the decision. PLOS ONE states that ground explicitly, along with a documented competing interest. Appeal on any other basis and the letter asks the editor to re-form a judgement, which almost never succeeds.

When is a rejection worth appealing?

A rejection is worth appealing when the error is unambiguous, material to the decision, and locatable in one line — a control the reviewer says is missing and is in Figure S3B, or a cited paper that shows something other than what the reviewer claims. It is not worth appealing when the disagreement is about importance, novelty, scope or tone.

What percentage of appeals succeed?

Journals rarely publish figures, but success is uncommon and concentrated in appeals citing a verifiable factual error. Appeals contesting a significance or scope judgement almost never reverse. PLOS ONE and Frontiers publish appeal policies but no counts of appeals filed or reversed, and the ICMJE recommends only that journals “clearly state their appeals process”. Treat any specific success rate you meet as unsourced unless it names the journal and the period it came from.

How long does an appeal take?

Typically several weeks, sometimes longer if the editor seeks an additional reviewer. That delay is the main penalty, since the paper cannot be under consideration elsewhere meanwhile. Most of the elapsed time is queue position rather than deliberation, because appeals are not prioritised over new submissions.

Can I appeal and submit elsewhere at the same time?

No. Simultaneous submission is prohibited, and an appeal keeps the paper under consideration at the original journal. Choose one. The ICMJE Recommendations state that “authors should not submit the same manuscript, in the same or different languages, simultaneously to more than one journal”, so the appeal has to be resolved or abandoned before the manuscript goes anywhere else.

Should I ask for a different reviewer?

Yes, provided the request is attached to a specific error rather than to disagreement. Frame it as reconsideration in light of the correction and let the editor decide who assesses it. Naming whom you believe the reviewer was, or asking for a particular replacement, converts a checkable request into a dispute about people.

What if the reviewer was rude but correct?

Then the criticism stands and the tone is not grounds for appeal. If conduct was genuinely unprofessional, raise it separately with the editor as a conduct matter, not as an appeal of the decision. Keep the two letters apart: a conduct complaint that also asks for the decision to be reversed reads as an appeal with no factual basis.