Writing a Cover Letter

When you submit your work to a journal, you typically accompany it with a Cover Letter that goes to an editor at the journal who needs to make the decision about whether your manuscript is a sufficiently good fit for the journal to it= out to peer-review. For a high-impact journal, this includes an assessment of whether it's sufficiently novel and is likely to generate good impact and boost the journal's reputation for publishing interesting and high-quality science.

The Cover Letter is your chance to make this pitch. It shouldn't simply summarize what you did (as your Abstract does, which the editor will already have on-hand), it should aim to talk (typically more confidently, closer to the style of a pitch) about why this article is going to generate great impact for the journal. It should normally fit within 1 page.