Desk reject after "awaiting reviewer selections" status

Question

I recently submitted a paper to a (not very selective) journal (Sage publications). After a week of submission, the status changed to "awaiting reviewer selections". I took this to mean that the paper has passed the desk review, since the editor is selecting reviewers. However, after a few days, I got a desk reject notification.

Is it possible to get a desk reject after the "awaiting reviewer selection" stage? Is it possible that the journal didn't find reviewers, hence rejected the paper? The rejection email gave only general feedback, hence I can't infer the exact reason.

Further, the journal submission guidelines indicated that the authors should suggest three potential reviewers. However, there was no specific field to submit this information, hence I didn't include it anywhere. Given this context, I have three questions:

1. Was my paper desk rejected because I didn't submit reviewer names? In general, can a paper be rejected for this/similarly trivial reason?
2. Do you include reviewer names in the title page/cover letter, if there is no specific field given to enter this information?
3. Can I re-submit to the same journal with the reviewer names included? Will it offend the editor?

Answer 1

Is it possible to get a desk reject after the "awaiting reviewer selection" stage?

Clearly it is, as your example illustrates.

More specifically, though: You are looking for all sorts of formal reasons why the paper might have been rejected, or maybe why they wrongly rejected it. But I don't think that's the right way of thinking about it. If an editor requires you to name three reviewers but can't find the three names anywhere, then they will generally tell you so rather than making up other reasons to reject a paper. The same applies to most of the other hypotheticals you are asking about: If an editor needs some information, it is easier to just ask for it than to come up with phony reasons to reject the paper.

My take is that the editor assigned the paper to reviewers and then one of two things happened: (i) They took a closer look at the paper and realized that there is no point to ask anyone to spend time on it; (ii) one of the reviewers wrote back and said something along the lines of "If you absolutely need me to, I can spend the time and write a full review. But I've looked at this paper and it will not stand a chance to make it past reviewers; you might as well save everyone the time and effort and reject it outright because of A, B, and C".

As for re-submitting to the same journal: You can always try, but it's rarely successful in practice. Take whatever feedback you got, make the paper better, and submit it somewhere else.

Answer 2

Was my paper desk rejected because I didn't submit reviewer names? In general, can a paper be rejected for this/similarly trivial reason?

Yes, that is possible. It depends on how many papers are submitted and how much space the journal has. It is not uncommon for a journal to have to reject 90% or more of the submissions. In those cases it helps everybody to reject early.

An alternative reason could be that some associate editor took control over a bunch of submissions including yours, pushed the "awaiting reviewer selections" button for all of them, and when it came time to select reviewers for your paper (s)he looked at it a bit more carefully and decided: "nope, that is not worthwhile".

Do you include reviewer names in the title page/cover letter, if there is no specific field given to enter this information?

I would have just contacted the journal and asked.

Can I re-submit to the same journal with the reviewer names included? Will it offend the editor?

I would contact the editor and ask.