awaiting reviewer assignment weeks

After submitting

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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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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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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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Thank you. payment completed., you will receive an email from us to confirm your registration, please click the link in the email to activate your account., there was error during payment, orcid profile found in public registry, download history, navigating peer review: sitting and waiting – what can you do what should you do.

• Charlesworth Author Services
• 17 September, 2019
• Peer Review Process

Navigating peer review: Sitting and waiting – What can you do? What should you do?

Congratulations! You’ve submitted your article to a leading international journal (hopefully with a high impact factor ) and have checked your author area within their online submission system to see that you’re now ‘awaiting reviewer scores’. Most online systems give authors the opportunity to check on the status of submissions : it’s a good idea to log in regularly to make sure that your article is moving through the peer review process . You will see little messages like ‘awaiting editorial approval’, ‘awaiting reviewer scores’, ‘awaiting editorial board comments’ and ‘decision pending’ as your article wends its way through this process. Eventually, an editor will make a decision and you will get your paper back with comments from peer reviewers .

Should you just sit, wait and do nothing as an author as this process runs its course?

No. One of the most common kinds of questions that we are asked during our paper writing and publishing workshops is along the lines of ‘I submitted a paper to a journal three months ago and I’ve heard nothing. The system still says ‘awaiting reviewer scores’. What should I do?’. Publication speed is very important to you as an author for obvious reasons: you must write to the editor if you have no news back about peer review and a reasonable amount of time has passed.

What constitutes a ‘reasonable amount of time’?

Well, the average length of time across the publishing industry from submission to online publication is three months or 90 days. We recommend writing to your journal editor if one month has passed and your paper appears ‘stuck’ in the submission system. Publishers are also interested in speed of publication, and many will use analytics to track this by journal and sometimes even by editor – so you are not the only one in this process with a vested interest!

Writing to journal editors about your paper

Authors, especially young researchers, are often nervous about writing directly to journal editors. Don’t be: this is your paper, your research, your career, and your future. [ Get in touch with our team at Charlesworth and we can provide you with short templates for writing these kinds of emails.]

Some quick tips:

- Be polite but direct when writing to a journal editor . What’s the issue that needs to be addressed?

- Make sure your email is positive: what solution are you proposing to the issue?

For example, let’s imagine that your research paper is stuck ‘awaiting reviewer comments’ and two months have passed with no news from the journal.

‘Dear Editor: I am writing on behalf of my co-authors to enquire about the status of our paper submitted on x date, entitled y’. We see that this article is ‘awaiting reviewer comments’ and more than two months have passed: we have therefore taken the opportunity to suggest the names of some additional colleagues who would be suitable peer reviewers’.

Don’t forget to include two or three additional names and email addresses at the bottom of your short message.

It’s always a good idea to write and interact directly with journal editors. As we’ve discussed before, they are very often also busy academic researchers, running their groups, supervising students, teaching and, also, managing journals. Papers get forgotten about, reviewers are not chased. You must take the initiative as an author : editors will appreciate and understand this! Don’t be pushy. Don’t be aggressive. Always be polite, constructive and offer solutions to save the editor time .

Once, in one of our author workshops , we were asked: ‘my paper has been in review with a journal for more than a year and I’ve heard nothing. What should I do?’. It’s your career. Please don’t let this happen to you!

Read next (third) in series: Navigating peer review: How to respond to peer reviewer comments – Minor revisions

Read previous (first) in series: Navigating peer review: Making your initial submission

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