Journal submission cover letters?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I've got a publication question. My sense is that cover letters are not really a thing when one first submits an article to a journal, but I want to make sure I'm correct about this. I just listened to a podcast about how to avoid desk rejects in science writing, and one of the big pieces of advice was "submit a good cover letter". My impression from that discussion was that, in the sciences, people actually use cover letters to tell editors why their article is impactful and worth publishing. Am I wrong that this practice is just not a part of philosophy? Does anyone regularly submit cover letters of this sort with initial submissions, and do you have any evidence that it has been helpful?

Another reader submitted the following reply: "Cover letters are unnecessary. Just submit the paper." However, I'm constantly surprised by things that I thought I knew about publication norms, only to be surprised later on. For example, I was pretty certain that it is a big 'no-no' to submit a paper that you’ve received a revise-and-resubmit verdict for at one journal to another journal (and then if it’s rejected at the other journal, submit the RnR at the first one). Yet, Elizabeth Harman chimed in saying it's just fine. So, who knows: maybe some editors care about cover letters? Or, perhaps cover letters can in some way be helpful in terms of selecting reviewers? I have no idea! Any editors out there care to weigh in on this? Does it help an author's cause to write a brief cover letter when submitting, or is it pointless?

Comments

[Matt Weiner]

As one of many area editors at Ergo, I'm not sure that there's even a means to include a cover letter with a submission, and if someone included a cover letter I wouldn't see it. And I'm pretty sure every submission gets sent to one area editor or other. So I'm pretty sure that in this case, preparing a cover letter would be pointless.

[mind-reader]

I cannot read Harmon's mind, but I do not think she means that once you have submitted an R6R to one journal you can also send it out to another - while waiting for a decision. I think she meant: instead of sending it to the journal that invited you to R6R, you can send it to another journal instead.

[Marcus Arvan]

@mindreader: yeah, she meant that one can submit to another journal after receiving an RnR verdict at the first journal (and then later submit the RnR to the first journal if the paper is rejected at the other one). I see how my OP here didn’t make that suitably clear. I’ve altered the post to make this clearer.

[ABD]

In the past, I've ignored the cover letter box for journal submissions; however, I recently sent an article to Mind & Language without a cover letter and they sent it back saying that I had to resubmit with a cover letter. The cover letter I ended up writing them was only a few sentences long saying that I was the sole author of the paper and that it wasn't under review anywhere else, and that seemed to be enough to get the article into the review process.

[Tim]

My standard cover letter is normally boiler-plate, two short sentences. I have done customizable cover letters on initial submissions before. Normally, I do them if there is some special issue--trying to explain why I think the paper does fit the aims of the journal, or how the paper seems superficially similar to something they published but is quite different, etc.

My impression is that many scientific journals care much more about impact factor and citation that philosophy journals. So some norms in the sciences may include listing things like conferences where the paper has been presented at. Those would indicate that the paper is not only good enough to be accepted, but good enough to receive lots of citations.