awaiting referee assignment means

After submitting

In this section:

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• 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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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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Understanding the Journal Review Process: How Associate Editors Work?

I have submitted a manuscript in mid-January; thereafter, I got another routine besides refreshing my Facebook page. The progress has been staying in “Awaiting Referee Selection” for about two months; until today, it changes to “Awaiting Referee Invitation.” I am so curious (and also frustrated) about the review process, and the following slide meets my curiosity perfectly – it will tell you how Associate Editors work.

This is an operation manual of Manuscript Central for AEs. MC is a popular manuscript processing system through which I have submitted my paper. I have embedded this file in this post, original link of this file is:

http://secure.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jjco/aemanualeng.ppt

[gview file=”http://maji.tacc.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/aemanualeng.ppt”]

Peer review process

Peer review is the process used to assess whether an academic paper is suitable for publication based on the quality, originality and importance of the work. Your paper is evaluated by expert peers in the field, known as referees, with a publication decision made by the journal editors.

Role of the Editor

Upon submission, Editors will assess the general suitability of your paper for the journal. If deemed suitable, the Editor will select referees for your paper, based on their scientific interests and background. The Editors may welcome suggestions for specific referees from you or your co-authors in some cases. When referee reports are received, an Editor will make an initial decision along the following lines:

• To unconditionally accept the paper
• To request mandatory amendments with likely acceptance
• To request major revision and encourage resubmission
• To reject the paper outright

The referees provide supporting remarks and their comments are generally very helpful for improving the quality of submitted papers.

Role of the referee

When asked to review a paper, typically referees are asked to comment on the following aspects of it:

• Scientific merit and accuracy
• Originality and motivation
• Appropriateness for the journal
• Clarity and conciseness
• Structure and balance
• Presentation, repetition and length
• Referencing

How long will peer review take?

This can vary dramatically, from several days to several months, for different research areas and depending on the responsiveness of referees. Check the journal website to see if it provides any information on typical review times. Often authors may track the progress of their paper online.

Can I appeal if my paper is rejected?

This depends on the journal policy. Often, if you can provide sufficient justification for an appeal and you can scientifically refute the reasons for the original rejection decision, then your appeal will be considered by the journal Editors. Check with the publisher.

Contour plot representing various maximum invariant masses of combinations of quarks and leptons N Srimanobhas and B Asavapibhop 2011 J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 38 075001.

The Peer Review Process

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What does "Awaiting Reviewer Scores" mean within the context of a ScholarOne submission system?

I submitted a paper to a Taylor and Francis journal that uses the ScholarOne submission system. The manuscript status has changed from "Under Review" to "Awaiting Reviewer Scores".

What does this change mean? What is the flow chart of the different statuses for a manuscript?

• paper-submission
• journal-workflow

6 Answers 6

With a typical ScholarOne configuration, "Awaiting Reviewer Scores" means that it is actually out with (at least some) reviewers, while "Under Review" would instead mean the previous stage, where it is being considered by the handling editor(s) and might still be rejected without review.

After the review scores come back, a manuscript then returns to the handling editor for a recommendation, and thence up to the chief editor(s) for a decision.

• 2 "Under Review" should be de-ambiguised to "Under Editorial Review" –  Dmitri Zaitsev Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 18:19

I have found a tutorial for Editors for Oxford journals. I think, this slide explains it all.

• 1 What does "MSs" stand for? –  TrungDung Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 12:22
• 1 @TrungDung "MS" is an abbreviation for "manuscript," so "MSs" would be "manuscripts." –  shoover Commented May 19, 2022 at 21:30

None of the answers above are accurate at least in my scenario. I had a revision decision, and after I submitted the revision, the status went to "Under review", and after about 4 weeks, it has now changed to "Awaiting reviewer scores". In this case, the reviewers were already lined up to get the revision, and so it doesn't make sense for "awaiting reviewer scores" to just mean that the reviewing is in progress -- in fact, it's "under review" that means that, and it doesn't make sense for "under review" to mean pre-screening. What the "awaiting reviewer scores" most plausibly means here is that the reviews are now due! 4 weeks is also the time I'd expect the AE to allot for the reviewers (from past experience), and so the timing is right for the status to change from "Under review" to "Awaiting reviewer scores" - so it just means some reviewers haven't yet submitted it and the reviews are either due or overdue. This explanation also makes sense if you just look at the English of the status "Under review" and "Awaiting reviewer scores" -- the scores aren't awaited unless it's due! It's probably why they chose this language for the status message. In addition, for all my submissions in the past, the "Under review" status has always meant that the paper was actually with the reviewers as opposed to with the AE waiting for the assignment; papers have been in the "Under review" status for me for several months after which they change to "Awaiting AE recommendation". So it makes no sense that "Under review" means pre-screening (as suggested by one of the comments) - it may be different for different journals but I doubt that is the case for any journal.

"Awaiting Reviewer Scores" means that the paper has been assigned the minimum amount of reviewers that the Associate Editor has set for the manuscript. The minimum would be either two or three depending on the publication but the associate editor might have sent a few more invitations around. "Under Review" means that reviewers have been selected and invitations have been sent out but some of them have not responded yet or some of them have rejected the invitation and the editorial board is still looking for reviewers.

I also think that it is up to the specific settings of each journal to show the different status of the review process. In some you can see "Under Review", "Awaiting Associate Editor Recommendation", "Awaiting EIC decision" etc but in others you just see "Under review" for the whole process.

• It seems the term "Under Review" is named ambiguously, which is what causes the confusion. –  Dmitri Zaitsev Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 18:21

Yes, Indeed mine is undergoing the same process as we speak. under review basically means that your manuscript is still with the handling editor and is being reviewed if instructions were followed, thus fit enough to be sent to blind reviewers. Awaiting reviewer score, it has been sent out to selected reviewers and is still awaiting for their scores (comments).

Awaiting reviewers scores simply mean the article is with the reviewers and the journal office is waiting for the comments.

Under review also can mean that the article is being considered by the science editor for technical and English language check or it is with the subject editor and he is evaluating it for external review, or the article is with the reviewer for evaluation.

So, the former (Awaiting reviewers scores) is a direct statement that the article is with the reviewers.

• You said " Awaiting reviewers ... the article is with the reviewers ... " and " Under review ... the article is with the reviewer for evaluation. ". Would you make it more clear? –  Nobody Commented Sep 16, 2015 at 7:23

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