Why research papers get rejected?

What are the most popular reasons editors usually reject your paper for?

1. If the topic of the research is completely out of the scope of the journal’s interests.
2. Research paper submission guidelines are not properly followed in the article.
3. The article may fail to mention the necessary sections of the journals.
4. There may be too many references from the author and co-authors' previous works.
5. The references are not up-to-date. i.e. if they are very old and have a very low impact factor.
6. The language, structure, figures, and word quality are not up to the mark.
7. There will not be proper justifications.
8. The research may not match the impact factor of the journal
9. Journal that has a huge number submission rate will reject more manuscripts even though they are high quality which is completely unavoidable. Nature is a British weekly scientific journal mainly in science and technology receives 10,000 submissions in a calendar year making them reject huge manuscripts.
10. If either of the authors is blacklisted or banned to submit manuscripts for any malpractices or breach of publishing ethics

Causes of paper rejection and how to handle a rejected manuscript

Choose the journal list very carefully. If the manuscript scope is different from the journal scope it will not be preferred by the readers of the journals. Hence, make sure your paper falls under the journal's scope. To ensure the same, read the articles which were previously published by the journal, and find if they are closely related to your area of research. A researcher needs huge knowledge or experienced mentor/s in journal publication to avoid rejection due to scope mismatch. Else, the authors’ most of the duration will get wasted in submitting to the wrong journals. The GoToppr team makes sure that the paper will be processed based on the journal's scope.

1. A researcher must strictly follow the guidelines provided by the journals. Make sure your articles were prepared based on the necessary section and formatting as per the journal guidelines. For every journal, there are specific paper preparation guidelines. Make sure that you have followed all the guidelines, issued by the journal, have been followed in your manuscript. The GoToppr teams have a separate team to ensure these things and they strictly follow the guidelines given by the journal in an article before applying to a journal.
2. The references used must be the latest references with good impact factors, importantly, the most related references. Try to avoid self-citations. The GoToppr team will only use references from standard journals like IEEE transactions, Springer link, Elsevier, etc.
3. The words used in the article must be standard words and also make sure the language, structure, and figures are up to the mark. The justifications must be logical. Prefer writing the article in your own simple and standard words. You can avail of third-party language editing services or scientific editing services to improve the article's contents.
4. Don’t try to include all objectives in a single paper. It may confuse the readers. Try to cover one objective and provide necessary justifications and validate it. If you have multiple objectives, it can be split up into more articles, if sufficient to accommodate in separate articles.
5. Including authors, who are related to the same research, geographically distributed, and renowned in the same research, can increase the chance to get the paper accepted easily.  for example, if the co-author is from IIT automatically the paper value gets increased because they already have more publications from standard journals.
6. Another important thing is Plagiarism removal. The content must be plagiarism-free. Most of the researchers are unaware of the similarity score of their manuscripts. Due to that, their papers may face rejection because of high similarity. Sometimes, it may lead to a ban, if the intolerable similarity is found by the journal. Authors must do research originally and uniquely with significant outcomes. Appropriate drafting of their outcome will not produce plagiarism-issue. Authors must find the similarity score through any plagiarism checkers and ensure that the score is within the acceptable limit. 
7. The most important thing is to gain knowledge by reading N number of papers that are published in standard journals so that the researcher can understand the methodologies and ideas, which are previously used, hence the researcher can make a good Ph.D. thesis with mandatory justifications. A good literature survey can give wide knowledge about their research. 
8. Research topic selection plays a major role in getting acceptance from reputed journals. When choosing a research area, it must be a trending one. It is better to choose a rare and good topic rather than choosing a topic in which more research has been carried out. In other words, if you select a popular research topic, your paper will become one among the thousands of submissions to a journal, and so, your paper will face strong competition among the submissions. In contrast, if your paper is one of the few topics of research, the competition is less and the chance of rejection is relatively less.
9. Ph.D. paper selection is important to identify the beginning of your paper because a strong and latest base paper decide the significance of your research outcome. So, choose a base paper of your research from the same or late calendar year, top journals, and top authors’ of your area of research.