Hi all,

I'd like to submit an article for peer-review but the paper needs a lot of editing and re-formatting to tailor it for a specific journal (it's based on an essay I wrote several years ago). Before I do all of this, is it normal/desirable to email the journal editor with a very short (2-3 sentences max) description of the article and ask whether they'd be interested in the topic? I haven't had any prior contact with the editor. This is for a humanities subject.

Thanks!

At a seminar I went to on getting papers published, the presenter suggested emailing the editor with a brief summary as reasonable and sensible, particularly so if the article you propose is slightly outside the normal scope of the journal but I think he deemed it an acceptable thing to do in general.

Okay, thanks a lot, Clupea! I figured it was a sensible thing to do but sometimes there are weird unspoken rules of etiquette in academia that I'm unaware of...

Cover letters are for this use, indeed.

Editors usually know their reviewers very well.
If they do not want your paper, they may send it to certain 'group' of reviewers…
Be careful when you write to them. :-)

Really?? Peer-review is supposed to be anonymous, so you mean they send it to someone who is hard to impress? I've never heard of that happening, but maybe I'm very naive!

Do you think editors would assign nasty reviewers for their papers in their journals?
I would assign insightful, helpful, and open-mined reviewers for my paper.