How to write a cover letter for journal article submission

Taylor and Francis, one of the world’s leading research publishers state this about the importance of cover letters to accompany your manuscript submission:

When submitting a manuscript, a well-written cover letter can help your paper reach the next stage of the process – being sent out for peer review. So it’s worth spending time thinking about how to write a cover letter to the journal editor, to make sure it’s going to be effective.

Following the advice of the Twitter threads (above and below), I wanted to share my approach for creating cover letters, using Excel and a Word mail merge process. This process may be useful to more efficiently generate cover letters, particularly if working across multiple manuscripts. Further, adding to an excel can help with tracking the submission journey and queuing up potential journals (and editor details) in the event your first journal preference is rejected.

The Excel is where you input various aspects of your manuscript submission such as the editors names (which can be found on the journal website) and how your manuscript aligns to the aims and scope. It’s possible the Excel and mail merge process is not useful for you; if not, you may like to download the Word template only!

Then, the Word document is where your previous inputs are merged into a letter ready to be saved and uploaded or copy and pasted for the editors!

I have included a sample cover letter as a PDF below; this cover letter was submitted alongside a now in-press manuscript.

I hope the above templates/ mail merge process are valuable for you!