Paper Up-Date

13 December 2011

As previously noted, I submitted my paper on indecision to yet another journal on 28 July. On 11 August, the reported status of the paper was changed to With Editor. Yester-day, 12 December, that was changed to Under Review, which indicates that the paper has been sent onward to one or more reviewers.

Editors generally have the authority to reject papers on their own authority. If they think that a paper might be appropriate to the journal, then they send the paper on to one or two reviewers, with ostensible expertise in the specific area of the paper. These reviewers judge the paper to be suitable as it stands, or suggest revisions that would make it suitable, or decide that it is unlikely to become suitable even after revision. At some journals, editors have the authority to over-rule reviewers, but such is rarely done.

Most submitted papers are rejected by editors before they reach reviewers. Most papers that reach reviewers are rejected by those reviewers. Most that are not rejected are required to be revised in some way, small or large.

I don't know why the paper was listed as With Editor for almost exactly four months. The editor may have been too busy to evaluate the paper at all, or may have spent a fair amount of time in his-or-her own evaluation of it, or may have had trouble finding a reviewer for it.

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2 Responses to Paper Up-Date

  • jerry says:

    I have got the same problem. Paper submitted in Sept. is still with editor in Jan. I wrote to main editor - no answer.

    • Daniel says:

      Those journals that I have seen present explicit guidelines about authors' querying editors for the statuses of papers state that authors should not do so for the first six months. I apply this guideline across all journals.

      I don't know what your discipline might be, but amongst economics journals in cases where the paper was not rejected quickly, a total time-to-decision of about six months is in no way extraordinary these days. And I get the impression, from my own experience and from other reports, that (across disciplines) journals that use Editorial Manager and its siblings are, for some reason, likely to take more time to decision than typically do other journals.

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