فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

About 30 out of 100 authors submitting to top-ranked journals celebrate the acceptance of their work while a significant majority routinely deal with the rejection of their research, according to Elsevier (2024). Situated in this asymmetry, this sociolinguistic study examines the reasons for the rejection of works submitted to research journals and the language in which this negative news is couched by editors of ‘high impact’ journals. Focusing on 21 negative decision emails shared by Filipino English language scholars identified through snowballing technique, this qualitative study first, identifies the common causes given for the rejection of article submissions to journals indexed in Scopus or Web of Science using qualitative content analysis. Then, it examines the practice (or lack) of empathy in this form of communication using Clark et al.’s (2012) approach in identifying and coding segments of empathic communication. The analysis reveals that rejections are linked to issues of substance (poor fit, methodological vagueness, insufficient contribution), form (non-compliance with submission guidelines), or both (high similarity score). It also shows that all 21 decline decisions are couched with some compassion, albeit variably expressing attentive, affective, and cognitive empathy. These findings can contribute practical guidance especially for novice researchers from the Global South, who are struggling to get their work legitimized by elite journals. At the same time, it can help promote empathy as an attribute to humanize the increasingly robotic race to ‘publish or perish.’