By: Alison McGonagle-O’Connell, Marketing Manager, Aries Systems Corporation
Once you’ve submitted a manuscript for publication in a journal, you may be anxious about your manuscript status. You may be asking: Who sees the manuscript after I submit it? When will I know if it’s good enough to move on to a peer review? When will I receive comments from peer reviewers? How long does it take to accept a manuscript? How will I be notified if it’s accepted or rejected?
To address these questions, journals using Editorial Manager for submission and peer review workflow can configure status terms that are conveniently displayed on author dashboards. This means that authors submitting to these journals will see customized editorial statuses that can help them to understand which stage a submission is at within the peer-review process.
For example, journals can configure status changes that give authors transparency into various stages within the review process that the submission will move through. Some examples include “editor assigned,” “reviewers invited,” “under review,” “review complete,” “decision pending,” and others. At the same time, journals may opt to display fewer statuses. While Editorial Manager provides editors with the tools to display granular status to authors, it is ultimately up to the journal’s individual policy to decide what level of status detail makes the most sense for the journal and author community.
Here is a short video on manuscript status in Editorial Manager, and some additional articles on the manuscript submission process. The graphic below shows how a typical manuscript goes through the Editorial Manager system, along with some of the terms used to describe the manuscript’s status. Across all Wolters Kluwer journals, the average time that a manuscript moves through the submission process from submission to first decision takes about 30 days, and to a final decision about 54 days, but this is dependent upon many factors and is different for each journal.
A manuscript’s progression from submission to decision
Note: these terms will vary by journal. This graphic is an overview of some of the terms used to describe different stages within each workflow step.