"Dear Dr. Scaramouche, your manuscript has now been reviewed. Based on the comments made by the referees, I decided to reject your paper for publication in our journal. Although I realize you will be disappointed by this decision, I nonetheless hope that the comments made by the referees will be helpful for you to resubmit your ms to another journal."
Researchers are evaluated on the quantity of papers and the "quality" of the journals in which they publish, so there is pressure to submit to the "most prestigious" publication possible. Partly for this reason, the chances of seeing one's paper accepted at first submission are meager, and nobody is spared the high rejection rate. Of course, rejected papers are rarely junk science that do not deserve publication, so most of them are simply resubmitted. Resubmission involves reformatting the manuscript following the next journal's guidelines. You could get the impression that ...
