92 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality journal is looking for, but may not be a specialist in your area. There was a time when most submission editors were experts in the topics of the papers they considered for publication, and with some publishers this is still the case, but it’s rarer nowadays and often your paper won’t pass under the eyes of specialists unless it makes it over the first hurdle and is sent on for peer review. It can helpful both for you and for the editor if you suggest in your letter (or in your paper itself if the journal guidelines indicate it) a few researchers who would serve as appropriate reviewers of your work. Such suggestions will be taken with a grain of salt, of course, because an author can influence the results of reviews significantly by guiding an editor to use reviewers who are friends or colleagues, or certain to support his or her results or perspective. So it would be extraordinary for an editor to follow up on all your suggestions, but often one or more of the scholars you suggest will be contacted to review your paper, and simply by offering important names in your field and implying that you believe respected academics or scientists will assess your work positively you establish a professional and confident tone in your letter. Such a tone is essential to the success of a covering letter: your confidence in your research methods, results and argument needs to shine through your prose without (and this can be tricky) coming across as arrogance or misjudgement about the value of your work. A precise and informative but brief explanation of exactly what your research is and why it is so important to both you and other scholars in your field will justify your confidence. You might want to indicate briefly, for instance, where your research fits into scholarship as a whole on the topic, how your methodology is reliable and/or innovative in relation to the approaches usually used in the area, the way in which your perspective differs from that of other researchers PARt III: commUnIcAtIng wItH JoURnAl edItoRs: sUBmIssIon, AccePtAnce, RevIsIon And ReJectIon