Check journal article against submission limits.
Journal word limits differ less in size than in scope, and scope is what catches authors out. A 7000-word limit covering main text only is a very different constraint from the same figure covering text plus references, since a reference list in a well-cited paper is commonly 1500 words — over 20 percent of the budget. Some journals count the abstract and figure captions too. Checking the scope in the author guidelines before drafting, rather than after, avoids the situation where a manuscript that appears comfortably inside the limit is 25 percent over on the definition that actually applies.
Countable words
Countable = main text + references if in scope + abstract and captions if in scope
Utilisation
Utilisation % = countable words / journal limit x 100
Because references can be a fifth of the total. A paper with 60 references occupies roughly 1500 words in the reference list alone. Whether that counts is the difference between comfortably inside a 7000-word limit and needing a substantial cut to the discussion.
The discussion, almost always. Introductions in a specialist journal can be shorter than authors think, but the discussion is where restatement of results, over-hedged interpretation and speculative future work accumulate. Reviewers rarely object to a tighter discussion; they do object to a compressed method.