For psychologists who pursue a career in scholarship, there is one more certainty beyond death and taxes: rejected articles. Strongly refereed journals have high rejection rates and so it is almost inevitable that, sooner or later, usually sooner, one will get an editor's letter rejecting a submitted article. Even most articles that ultimately are accepted first were rejected. In some cases, the editor gave the author a chance to resubmit. In other cases, the author simply submitted the article to another journal. In either case, the article was rejected before it was accepted.

Outright acceptances are quite rare. When I was editor of the Psychological Bulletin, for example, our outright acceptance rate for initial submissions was probably about 2%.

The goal of this book is to offer authors guidance in how to write better articles and thereby improve their chances for acceptance. The book is divided into 14 chapters, including a final integrative chapter, with each of the first 13 chapters covering a different aspect of the article-writing process, including writing an empirical article, writing a literature review, titles and abstracts, introductions, theories and hypotheses, experimental design, data analysis, results, discussions, citations and references, writing for reviewers, reading reviews, and methods.

A unique feature of this book is that all chapter authors have been editors or associate editors of major psychological journals, so that they are in a good position to write about writing articles.