Every paper submitted to a good scientific journal goes through peer review. Manuscript submission is just the very beginning of what could be a lengthy process, at the end of which the manuscript may get rejected or accepted. Usually, the journal editor is the first to see your paper. The editor decides if the paper fits the journal’s scope. If it does, he/she will send it for peer review. Generally, there are four possible decisions on your work. It can be rejected, accepted, accepted with minor revisions, or accepted with major revisions. Predicting the review cycle for any journal is difficult. However, generally journals revert within three months. If you have had no response from the journal within three months, you can request an update from the same on your paper’s status. If you have chosen a more popular journal your wait time may be longer. Interestingly, papers with the lowest and highest impact factors have the longest review times. The longer time taken may be due to lengthy peer reviews. In fact, time to publication has increased in popular journals. For Nature, the review time was 85 days a decade ago. Now it is 150 days. While for PLoS ONE, it has increased from 37 to 125 days over the past 10 years.
In case your manuscript is ready for submission, let us complete this tedious process on your behalf. Check through Enago’s Journal Submission service will help you in this above process. Good luck with your manuscript submission!
