After submitting
In this section:
- NEW! Featured Author Support
- Tracking your submission
- My paper has been accepted – what next?
- Appeals and rebuttals
- BMJ Article Transfer Service
- Abstracting and indexing
- Archiving, permissions and copyright
- Article metrics and alerts
- Correction and retraction policies
- Publication embargo
- Rapid responses
The review process
1. Awaiting Editorial Production Assistant Processing
The Editorial Production Assistant will carry out quality checks on your article at which point you may need to provide further information before your article is sent for Peer Review.
2. Awaiting Editor Assignment:
Your article has passed initial quality checks by the Editorial Production Assistant and is in the process of being assigned to an appropriate Editor who will evaluate your article for scope, quality, and fit for the journal. Papers that do not meet these criteria will be rejected.
3. Awaiting Reviewer Selection
Your article meets the Journal’s scope and has been approved for peer review. The Editorial Team are in the process of finding suitable external expert reviewers that are available to review your article. Your article may also be sent to relevant Associate Editor’s for internal review. For most articles, a minimum of two reviews are required. Articles can be sent to multiple prospective reviewers before the required number are secured.
4. Peer Review in Progress
Your article has secured the minimum number of required reviewers. Peer reviewers are given 2 weeks to submit their review of your article. On the occasion that a reviewer withdraws from the process, the Editorial Team will begin the reviewer selection process again.
5. Awaiting Editor Decision
Your article has now received the minimum number of reviews required to make a decision. The Editor will take into account the expert reviewers’ opinions to make an informed decision of accept, reject or revise.
6. In Production
Your article has been accepted and you will receive an email to confirm. Your article will move through the final quality checks and in to Production where it will be processed for publication. You will be emailed by the Production Editor with a timeline and be provided with a link to a platform called Publishing at Work where you can continue to track your article’s progress. More information about the Production process can be found here .
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How can I check the status of my submitted paper?
Modified on Fri, 27 Oct 2023 at 04:59 PM
To check the status of your submission in our system, log into your ScholarOne Manuscripts account, and click on “Author.” Under the Author Dashboard Section, click on “Submitted Manuscripts.”
Please note that the following definitions generally apply to most journals. Each journal follows its own workflow, so some terms may not apply. Please contact the journal's editorial office for clarification.
Please see our resources on the peer review process and tips on How to Get Published .
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Submitted my paper. Now what?
Feb 18, 2022 | Scholarly publishing
There is something of an air of mystery as to what actually happens to your manuscript once you’ve pressed that “submit” button. It seemingly goes off into cyberspace and you are left playing the waiting game.
These days, if you’ve submitted to a journal via an online submission system, you will be able to track its progress to some extent as you will generally be able to see what stage it’s at. The names of these stages can, however, seem fairly vague and almost worse than no information at all.
So let’s translate them. There are many different submission systems and the stages a manuscript goes through during peer review does differ system to system (and, indeed, journal to journal), so for the purposes of this post we’re going to look at the most common stages of the most common submission site: ScholarOne (formally Manuscript Central).
First Steps
Initially your manuscript will go through stages such as “Awaiting Admin Checklist” and/or “Awaiting Editor Assignment” depending on how new submissions are initially checked on the journal. These stages tend to be moved through fairly swiftly as they are just the editorial team checking that your submission is suitable for peer review and then deciding which of the editors will be responsible for it during the process.
Awaiting Reviewer Selection
This is the first stage of the peer-review process and your manuscript will be here until the assigned Editor has selected some suitable experts to invite to review.
Once enough reviewers have been selected, the manuscript will move on to the next stage. If only one reviewer agrees to review and all the others decline the invitation, however, your manuscript may well return to this stage while the Editor selects more. So if you log in to check on progress several weeks after submission and find your manuscript at this stage, it doesn’t necessarily mean that no action has been taken.
Awaiting Reviewer Invitation
This means that potential reviewers have been selected, but have yet to be invited. Manuscripts quite often return to this stage if not enough of the invited reviewers accepted the invitation so further invitations need to be sent. It’s quite common for editors to select a lot of reviewers, but only invite a few at a time.
Awaiting Reviewer Assignment
This rather ambiguous stage is when reviewers have been invited, but we are waiting for the required number to agree to review. In other words, at this point, the ball is squarely in the reviewers’ court!
In an ideal world, enough of the invited reviewers will agree to review and your manuscript will move on to the next stage. In reality, however, it is quite normal for invited reviewers to be unavailable and for your manuscript to return to one of the earlier stages a couple of times.
Awaiting Reviewer Scores
This is the stage that the editorial team will be striving to get your manuscript to as swiftly as possible. If your manuscript is at this stage, then enough experts have agreed to read and evaluate it and we just need to wait for the reviewers to return their comments so that a decision can be taken.
Once through this stage, your manuscript will move on to a stage such as “Awaiting Recommendation” and/or “Awaiting Decision” and it generally won’t be long before a decision is sent to you.
So That’s It?
That’s it. There are, of course, many things that can cause delays to the process, but the majority of manuscripts move from one stage to the next fairly swiftly.
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2. Awaiting Editor Assignment: Your article has passed initial quality checks by the Editorial Production Assistant and is in the process of being assigned to an appropriate Editor who will evaluate your article for scope, quality, and fit for the journal. Papers that do not meet these criteria will be rejected. 3. Awaiting Reviewer Selection
Initially, once your paper was submitted, the status showed "Admin not assigned." Then it was assigned to an Editorial Assistant (EA) for admin check. This is when the status changed to "EA: [name]." Once the EA started checking the manuscript, the status changed to "Awaiting ED Assignment." At this stage, the EA goes through the paper and ...
Meaning of 'Awaiting Editor Assignment' This means that your manuscript has cleared the admin check, that is, it was found matching the journal's scope and also adhering to the journal's guidelines, apart from a cursory check of the novelty and quality of the study.
6. Decision notification e-mails and what they mean. There are several decisions that authors may receive after submitting their paper to one of the Society's journals: Reject without review: The Action Editor has rejected the paper without sending it for peer review. Reject: The paper has been through the peer review process and the Action ...
Awaiting Admin Processing: Your submission is waiting for initial review by the editorial office. This may involve checking that the submission is within the journal's scope and adheres to submission guidelines. Awaiting Editor Assignment: Multiple editors may be assigned to your submission, depending on the journal's workflow.
The acronym ME most likely stands for "Managing Editor" or "Manuscript Editor", and so the message says that the paper is awaiting processing by this person. As shown in this question on the process for journals , that initial "processing" step usually involves an initial assessment by that initial editor, and if it passes that hurdle it will ...
The journal peer review process. Understand the journal and case study peer review process and read our tips for revising your submission. When you have submitted your paper or case study, up to three experts in the field will review it to provide validation, quality control and added value to you in the form of constructive feedback.
I submitted a paper more than one month ago. The status of my submission is still "awaiting assignment". May I ask if this is normal? How long have I to wait before formally asking the editor about the status of my submission? My field is mathematics.
1. I submitted a short paper to a math journal more that one month ago. The status is still "awaiting assignment" and I checked the online system which shows that even no editor has been assigned to my paper. I sent two emails about updating the status of the paper to editor and Editor-in-Chief several days ago and I got no reply from them.
First Steps. Initially your manuscript will go through stages such as "Awaiting Admin Checklist" and/or "Awaiting Editor Assignment" depending on how new submissions are initially checked on the journal. These stages tend to be moved through fairly swiftly as they are just the editorial team checking that your submission is suitable for ...
1 Answer to this question. In my opinion, ED in ScholarOne refers to Editor and GE refers to Guest Editor. Going by that assumption, the status of your first manuscript "ED: Not Assigned, GE: Not Assigned, Awaiting JM Checklist" means that no action has yet been taken on your paper. I'm not sure what JM checklist refers to, but my guess is that ...
The manuscript awaiting the assignment of an editor for more than two-and-half months is both a bit long and unusual. It's more common to have a challenge finding peer reviewers, unless with this journal or for this paper, the review is to be done internally. If that's not the case, the journal is having a challenge assigning an editor to ...
Account Setup and Maintenance. Your account on the journal's ScholarOne Manuscripts site may be created in one of two ways. The journal may create your account and e-mail you instructions on how to login. Some journals may include account information along with the invitation to review.
Depending on the journal, two weeks isn't really a long time for editor assignment. Your manuscript might be at the end of a pretty long queue that might take time. Moreover, getting the right editor for your topic is also sometimes an issue. Another point to note is that ScholarOne is not always up-to-date with the process of the publisher.
Maybe the editor found a reviewer before changing the manuscript's status, so it passed through the "awaiting reviewer assignment" stage in a single step. Cite Top contributors to discussions in ...
I have submitted a research paper in Elsevier journal. After 18 days the status was "Awaiting Reviewer Assignment". And after 4 months the status changed to "awaiting EIC decision". And now statues is "awaiting ed final processing". Can anybody please tell me what does it indicate?
Generally, the status changes to "Awaiting ED recommendations" once peer review for the paper is done and the reviewer comments have come in. If that was the case for your paper, then a subsequent change to "Awaiting reviewer invitation" would mean that the editor is sending your paper for an additional review.
Each journal's site has a unique web address that should be provided to you by your site Admin via e-mail. To access the site, click the link within the e-mail or enter the web address (URL) in
The journal Electron Device Letters (EDL), as the name suggests, is for publishing letters, that is, shorter articles - about four pages long (including references), going by the description on the journal site. This could be another reason for the swift movement from submission to the ED/EIC decision - as this is a shorter piece. However, there are other possibilities for such a quick ...
I submitted my paper to a journal twelve days ago. In Manuscript Central, there were some changes of the paper's status during the first two days, and as far as I can remember, these were Awaiting ADM Processing and Awaiting technical editor selection. At the third day, I saw Awaiting EE Decision which is still there.. From some previous posts I assume that such decision status is normally ...
The editorial hierarchy varies from journal to journal. Eic usually signifies the Editor in chief. Once initial check up is done on your manuscript, the EIC will screen your manuscript to check if it fits the scope of the journal and if it is of sufficient interest to the journal's readership. He will then assign a AE or an academic editor who ...
1. You can send a request for an update at any time. You may or may not learn anything. There could be many reasons for a delay, including not sending too many papers to one editor and needing to find another who is suitable. But an average of 30 days tells you little about the distribution of actual times.