Gauging the likelihood for acceptance of a paper submitted to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Authors contemplating submitting papers to the Journal of the Acoustical Society (JASA) should first determine whether JASA is an appropriate journal, as it is possible that submissions for which this is not the case will be immediately rejected. A principal criterion is whether the paper will find a wider readership with JASA publication than with an alternative journal. If the appropriateness for JASA may not be manifestly obvious to the editors, then the authors should submit a cover letter explaining why, and they should write their paper so that there is a clear tie-in with articles previously published in JASA, preferably recent articles. Authors are advised to select the Associate Editor who is most likely to be familiar with the subject matter of the paper. Given that the paper is appropriate and an Associate Editor can be identified who is willing to handle the paper, it will be subsequently judged for possible acceptance based on several criteria: the most important being whether the paper is (i) original, (ii) significant, (iii) clearly written, and (iv) suitably limited in scope. The significance criterion is discussed at some length.