Cover letter to a journal editor for a research article
Who wrote it
Dr Heba Ragab, a public health lecturer in Assiut, is submitting her team’s study of smartphone use and sleep among 1,240 university students.
The writer and every detail about them are fictional.
What went into the template
- Journal and article type
- PLOS ONE, research article
- Manuscript title
- Bedtime smartphone use and sleep quality among university students in Egypt: a cross-sectional study of 1,240 students
- What you found, in plain words
- Question: is screen use in the hour before sleep linked to poorer sleep quality? Most studies rely on self-reported screen time; we used screen-time logs from students’ phones with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index
1,240 students at 4 Egyptian universities
More than 60 minutes of screen use in the last hour before sleep: about twice as likely to report poor sleep (adjusted odds ratio 2.1, 95% CI 1.6–2.7) - Why this journal
- Broad readership in public health, medicine and education; open access, so student health services can read it; the journal has published student health studies from many countries, and data from North Africa are scarce
- Declarations
- Original; not under consideration elsewhere; all authors approved; ethics approval from our faculty’s research ethics committee and informed consent; no competing interests; no specific funding; anonymised data in a public repository
The writer’s facts, as typed into the template’s form. The example uses nothing else.
The example
Cover letter to a journal editor: Journal submission
Numbered notes in the margin explain each choice.
Dear Dr Evans,
Greeting
Please consider our manuscript, “Bedtime smartphone use and sleep quality among university students in Egypt: a cross-sectional study of 1,240 students”, for publication as a research article in PLOS ONE1.
What is submitted
Note 1: The first paragraph does one job: the title, the article type and the journal. Editors handle many submissions and want this first.
Poor sleep is common among university students, and screen use before bed is often blamed, but most of the evidence comes from self-reported screen time2. We asked whether screen use in the hour before sleep is linked to poorer sleep quality, using screen-time logs from the students’ own phones together with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Among 1,240 students at four Egyptian universities, those with more than 60 minutes of screen use in the last hour before sleep were about twice as likely to report poor sleep3 (adjusted odds ratio 2.1, 95% CI 1.6–2.7).
Question, method, finding
Note 2: The reason the paper is new, in one clause, without the word “novel”.
Note 3: The finding in plain words first, then the statistics in brackets. An editor outside the field can still follow it.
We believe the study suits PLOS ONE because the question matters to a broad readership in public health, medicine and education, and because open access will let the student health services that could act on it read it4. The journal has published studies of student health from many countries, and our data add a large sample from North Africa, where such data are scarce.
Why this journal
Note 4: Fit is argued through readers who will use the findings, not through praise of the journal.
The manuscript is original, has not been published and is not under consideration elsewhere, and all authors have approved the submission. The study was approved by the research ethics committee of our faculty, and all participants gave informed consent. We have no competing interests to declare, and the study received no specific funding. The anonymised dataset is available in a public repository5, as described in the manuscript.
Declarations
Note 5: Complete declarations save the editor from writing back. Data availability is required by many journals.
Thank you for considering our work.
Closing
Yours sincerely,
Dr Heba Ragab, on behalf of all authors
Corresponding author
Structure
How it is built
Each part in order, with its share of the words.
Checklist
Before you send
Go through your own draft line by line.
Before and after
Common mistakes and how to fix them
Lines like these turn up in many drafts by Arabic speakers. Each fix keeps the meaning and changes only the English.
In this novel and groundbreaking study we prove for the first time that phones destroy sleep.
We asked whether screen use in the hour before sleep is linked to poorer sleep quality.
Kindly find attached our manuscript for your kind consideration.
Please consider our manuscript, “Bedtime smartphone use and sleep quality among university students in Egypt”, for publication as a research article in PLOS ONE.
The results showed a significant relation between phone and sleep.
Students with more than 60 minutes of screen use in the last hour before sleep were about twice as likely to report poor sleep.
Questions people ask
Do journal editors actually read cover letters?
Yes, often first, when they decide whether a manuscript goes out to review. A clear letter lets them see the question, the finding and the fit within a minute.
How long should a cover letter to a journal be?
One page at most. This letter has about 280 words, in five short paragraphs: what is submitted, the question and finding, the fit, the declarations and a thank-you.
Should I suggest reviewers in the cover letter?
Only if the journal asks, and usually in the submission system rather than the letter. Never suggest close collaborators or people at your own institution.
Every writer in this library is fictional, and so is every detail about them. Universities and companies appear only as places someone applies to; the professors, papers and facts mentioned around them are invented for teaching. Use the examples to learn the moves, never as text to copy: committees notice, and your own facts are stronger.