Why You Should Write a Cover Letter
本文从编辑视角阐述了撰写投稿信的必要性和实用建议，包括说明论文与期刊的契合度、推荐审稿人、声明生成式AI使用情况等，帮助作者争取更有利的审稿过程。
As an editor, it is a pleasure to read a carefully crafted cover letter, but this is actually a rather rare experience. Indeed, the majority of authors don't bother to write a cover letter at all. Even when a cover letter is submitted, it often says little more than ‘Dear Editor, Here is my paper for review. The authors’, which is not particularly informative. Prospective authors sometimes ask me if it is even necessary to write a cover letter. It seems to be an unwelcome chore that is little more than a waste of their precious time. My answer is always a resounding YES! It is necessary and it is actually in your best interest to do so. The cover letter is the one place where you can write whatever you like without references, without meticulous argumentation, and in order to benefit yourself. Why not write a cover letter? There are many different things that you can usefully write about in a cover letter. For example, you can explain why your submission is a good fit for this journal, and your explanation could certainly reference the ongoing intellectual conversation at the journal as evidenced by recently published papers. You can also highlight key contributions that your paper makes. You can identify potentially suitable senior and associate editors who already work for the journal, and explain why you believe that they might be suitable. You can even identify potential reviewers for your paper, as well as people you would prefer not to review your paper, for instance if there are conflicts of interest or position. The intention here is not to give you a lot of homework to do before you actually submit, but to help you secure a review team that is more likely to be sympathetic to your research and thus engage constructively with it. That's not a guarantee of acceptance, but it may provide you with some assurance that the review process is not inherently biased against you! Editors are, I suspect, more likely to assign your paper to a Senior Editor that you requested (and you could suggest several) than not to do so, assuming that there are no conflicts of interest and that the Senior Editor you request is not overloaded with other papers. The same applies to the Associate Editor and to some degree the reviewers, though it is unlikely that you would get more than one of the reviewers you nominated. If, of course, you can't find any suitable Senior or Associate Editors on the journal's editorial board, then that may give you, the author, pause for thought: is this really the right journal to submit to? You can also use a cover letter to draw attention to particular aspects or components of your paper that are significant. These might relate to the contribution, method, novelty or impact. Further, as an editor I would find it very helpful if you could indicate to what extent you have used Generative AI (GAI) tools in the research. GAI tools include, but are not limited to, Large Language Models, Generative Adversarial Networks, Stable Diffusion, and platforms like HuggingFace, which can generate or update content. A transparent declaration of how you used GAI tools (if at all) would greatly facilitate the review process. We recognise that GAI tools have developed rapidly in the last couple of years and can be expected to develop further. However, we insist that no matter how sophisticated a GAI tool may appear to be, it cannot substitute for human agency in the authorship of manuscripts that are submitted to this journal. All authors must be human. This is specified clearly in the author guidelines. Nevertheless, we also recognise that GAI tools may be valuable for such mechanical tasks as grammar checking, transcribing interviews, translating text, and reference formatting. This usage is permitted at the ISJ, with some caveats. For instance, if you are using a GAI tool to transcribe interviews, it is critical that you check the accuracy of the transcription as GAI tools may introduce inaccuracies. Also, if you are uploading your data (e.g., interview audio files for transcription, as data analysis is not permitted: see below) to a GAI tool, which then retains the data for its own purposes (e.g., training), then do you have explicit consent from your data subjects to do so? This is primarily an ethical issue and must be explained carefully in the methods section of the paper. Finally, GAI tools must not be used for intellectual tasks, such as problem formulation, synthesis and analysis of literature, data analysis, development of theoretical arguments, and discussion of findings. For these activities, we insist that the human agency is not replaceable or substitutable. We strongly advise authors to include a cover letter in which they describe, inter alia, how they have used or not used GAI tools in their research. I am grateful to Antonio Díaz Andrade, Monideepa Tarafdar, Andrew Hardin, Hameed Chughtai, Petros Chamakiotis and Sutirtha Chatterjee for comments and suggestions.