awaiting reviewer assignment vs selection

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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Selecting and inviting reviewers.

Sourcing reviewers can be the most time-consuming part of an editor’s role. The following guidance aims to minimise the number of invites an editor must send for each manuscript and improve time to decision for our authors.

Click the link to navigate to information on:

• Sage’s peer review policy  

Building an effective reviewer database

Identifying keywords, reviewer expertise, bias and conflicts of interest, checking for conflicts of interest.

• Sage Track account info  
• Reviewer verification 

Review content

Reviewing a paper yourself.

• Peer reviews by early career researchers 

Recommended reviewers

Optimising turnaround times, sage's peer review policy.

In general, Sage strongly recommends obtaining two independent external reviews, which have addressed the paper in detail, before making a first decision.

Unless desk rejected, Reject decisions may be based on a thorough single review.

If the two reviews are insubstantial, highly conflicting or raise any cause for concern, a further review should be sought.

To maintain an effective Sage Track database of active reviewers we recommend that you:

Regularly select reviewers from outside of Sage Track and add them to the database

Flag inactive reviewers, give every review an r-score.

To do this via the system:

• Click ‘External Searches'

• Selecting too many keywords may overwhelm the search and not provide results; it is suggested to start with the most relevant keyword

• You can search across the following platforms:

• You can provide more account information if desired
• Select ‘Create and Add’  
• The reviewer will automatically appear in the Reviewer List

Edit the user’s account to list them as an ‘Excluded Reviewer’ so that their names don’t pull into your results.

The R-Score is the average score a reviewer receives from editors. At the bottom of a completed review, you will see two brief rating scales – one for timeliness and one for quality assessment, on a scale from 1 to 3. Simply give your score for the review and click ‘Save’.

Each score a reviewer receives is collected and averaged to produce the overall R-Score. The R-Score is attached to a person’s account and can be used in reviewer searches and reports to find and determine the best reviewers in your site.

• Change the sort order of your search results to Primary: R-Score descending to obtain the higher rated reviewers first
• You will get the most accurate R-Score results if every editor in the site rates reviewers for every review completed.

To begin, identify the keywords of the manuscript. You may use the author-provided keywords or scan the abstract to find keywords that best represent the topic(s). 

Common strategies for identifying keywords: 

• JOURNAL TITLE: Often, the journal title will contain a keyword that is essential to the manuscript. For example, all manuscripts from a journal that focuses on HIV and AIDS may want to use ‘HIV’ or ‘AIDS’ as keywords ​
• TITLE/ABSTRACT: Keywords may also be identified in the title of the manuscript and/or the abstract. For example, a specific drug name or a specific medical condition. For example, ‘children’ could be used to refine the search to only include articles about children;  ​
• MeSH   terms: A way to refine phrases that include the keyword. This is useful when the terminology of the manuscript is unfamiliar or if the results were too broad.

Identifying suitable reviewers

It is important to include a basic search for some background information on each reviewer you invite. This not only ensures you’re selecting candidates who are more likely respond positively to your invite, but it’s an important due diligence step for minimising conflicts of interest of biases in the peer review process. Complete checks on the following:

• Identifying suitable reviewers  
• Sage Track account info

Reviewers should meet as many of the criteria below as possible:

• Check their publication record
• Check their institutional page for their specialities within a field of study and what they focus on
• Look for people who have been first or last authors on several papers in the area, not someone who's consistently in the middle in papers with multiple authors (as they might be a technician or someone with only tangential expertise)
• There is overlap between the reviewer’s previous work and the manuscript
• Keywords essential to the manuscript in process should overlap with those found in a reviewer’s profile or previous work
• The reviewer has reviewed other manuscripts on the same topic (when sourced via the Sage Track database or Web of Science Reviewer Recognition).

When inviting reviewers, it’s necessary to ensure that there is no conflict of interest with the authors. For example:

• The reviewer should have no prior knowledge of the submission
• The reviewer should not have recently (COPE recommend 3 years) collaborated with any of the authors
• Editors should also be aware of potential conflicts of interest between authors and reviewers with regard to industry associations (e.g. relating to relationships with pharmaceutical companies).          

Use PubMed to check publications between potential reviewer and list of authors adding the potential reviewer to the string with each iteration.

Use the string: [potential reviewer last name, first name initial][AU] AND ([author 1 last name, first name initial][AU] OR author 2 last name, first name initial][AU] OR [etc.][AU]

Make note of PubMed strings on the Notes section of S1 for that manuscript

Selecting reviewers from areas where duplicate names are common for papers that have authors from the same geographical location may be challenging at times, since checking for conflicts using a PubMed string for these can lead to the identification of erroneous conflicts. PubMed often pulls together any authors with the same last name and initial so looking for bona fide conflicts by supplementing this with a Scopus search can be a way to work around this problem.

Sage Track account info

The following information is available on Sage Track. Click the magnifying glass next to the person’s name to open the pop-up window.

Account information

• Are there any comments in the user’s account information to suggest this person should not be invited? E.g. ‘They have retired’.

Author history

• Has the reviewer previously submitted to the journal? If so, has their submission(s) been accepted or rejected?

Reviewer history

• Has the reviewer reviewed for the journal before?
• It can be useful to look at the reviewer’s past reviews to ensure they have submitted good quality comments
• Their basic history will show the reviewer’s recommendation and the final decision
• When did they last review for the journal? We try to avoid overburdening our reviewers and so would advise against inviting a reviewer who has recently provided a review (e.g. in the last 6 weeks) 
• Their basic history will also list their turnaround times (you may wish to avoid inviting reviewers who have routinely provided overdue comments)
• Has the reviewer authored a paper previously submitted to the journal? These users may be more likely to agree to review for the journal.
• Has the reviewer previously agreed to review papers but failed to submit comments?
• Has the reviewer recently declined to review a paper?
• Has the reviewer failed to respond to invitations in the past?  
• Does the reviewer have any pending assignments? As above, to avoid overburdening our reviewers, we try to avoid concurrent assignments.

NOTE All reviewers must be verified. See ‘Reviewer Verification’ in the Ethics and Best Practice section of this handbook.

Ethics and best practice

See best practice guidance for the following:

• Recommended reviewers 

Reviewer verification

Once you have found potential reviewers using the selection tips provided in this document, you will need to verify them by taking the following steps:

• This (especially in cases where the email address is derived from an institution) should lead you to the reviewer’s institutional website
• Ask if they can confirm whether they are the same person as the individual who has a Sage Track account registered under the other email address
• Some individuals may have ORCID profiles which will provide information on publications, peer review activity, employment history, education and qualification, and other relevant details
• A fake email address is unlikely to be registered anywhere, or to appear in results.

Institutional email addresses

Institutional, agency and other professional email addresses are useful to Editors as they generally enable the quick and reliable verification of reviewers.

• If you can find an institutional or employer webpage containing the person’s name, email address and some indication of their position, qualifications and expertise, the reviewer is considered ‘verifiable’
• If you can find the reviewer’s institutional website but it does not have a page with their professional qualifications and contact details, try searching for the name in the reviewer’s department or faculty listing.

If the reviewer cannot provide an institutional email address, then consider the following guidance on verifying those with non-institutional email addresses before deciding whether to invite the reviewer.

Non-institutional email addresses

We understand that many researchers either do not have a professional account or prefer to use a personal account. We therefore encourage Sage reviewers to use an institutional email address or, if this is not possible or convenient, ask them to provide the following additional information when using a personal email address:

• Where a reviewer prefers to use a personal email address as their primary contact address, ask that they include an institutional or other professional email address as their Secondary Email Address in their author account on the submission system.
• Where a reviewer(s) does not have a verifiable (via institutional profile page) email address, ask that they state this in the Confidential Comments to Editor (or an email to the Editor/Admin if the review has been submitted) and provide any links to their publication record (associated with that email) or other legitimate public profiles which could be used to verify the individual.
• Where the reviewer(s) are unable to provide this supporting information, they should explain their position in the Confidential Comments to Editor (or email) and ensure they have their ORCID profile linked to email address in question.
• Editors are reminded to check that, where provided, this information is in the Confidential Comments to the Editor and not the Comments to Author.
• Be particularly wary of using non-institutional email addresses that include numbers or additional letters, e.g. FIRSTNAME.SURNAMEb@address or INITIAL.SURNAME152@address
• If not, contact the email address they have published with and use this (if recent) when inviting them to review
• For reference, here is a list of internet country codes and top-level domains and domain extensions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains .
• If you cannot verify a reviewer based on the information you have, you may wish to email the reviewer and ask for an institutional, or other verifiable, email address
• If you have exhausted all options and still cannot verify the reviewer then you should not invite them, or discount their review should they have already submitted it.

TIP If you can verify a reviewer, we recommend adding a note to their account, with a link to the relevant webpage(s). This will make identifying suitable reviewers easier in the future.

• All reviews and comments should be substantiated
• Reviewers should not recommend citations of their own papers without sufficient explanation as to why the work is relevant
• Be aware of any rapid or short reviews that recommend acceptance or minor revision without detail
• You should also look out for duplicate reviews (i.e. similar reviews from two different accounts for the same manuscript)
• If found, flag this with your Publishing Editor
• For detailed information on Sage’s expectations for the content of a review, see the Reviewer Gateway .
• It is not best practice for editors to review manuscripts to which they are assigned in an editorial capacity
• Contact your Publishing Editor should you have an exceptional circumstance whereby you feel that you may need to review a manuscript yourself
• If you do complete a review for a paper you’re assigned to, then best practice is to provide a non-anonymised review, listing your name and role on the journal at the end of the review comments.

Peer reviews by early career researchers

We can accept reviews from students or junior researchers on the following conditions:

• A supervisor/mentor must agree to provide guidance to the mentee and approve the review comments before submission
• The review comments must be submitted by the early career researcher via their own account (NOTE The supervisor can still receive recognition for their contribution via Web of Science Reviewer Recognition )
• As with any review, the Editor should be confident with the level of detail and quality of the review for it to contribute to their final decision
• Where the appropriate wording is in the Reviewer Invitation email*, upon declining an invitation supervisors can recommend a junior colleague through the ‘Suggested Alternates’ function, using the Comments section to note their status as an Early Career Researcher

In all other cases, supervisors must request permission from the Editor.

*Wording for the reviewer invitation email template

Unable to review at this time?

You will be given the opportunity to recommend alternative expert reviewers should you decline this invitation. Where possible, we ask that you provide institutional email addresses when doing so.

Want to involve a junior colleague in the review?

[Journal name] supports peer review mentoring and accepts reviews from students and junior researchers. Should you decline this invitation but wish to suggest a junior colleague to review the paper, type ‘Early Career Researcher’ or ‘ECR’ in the Comments Box when recommending alternative reviewers for the paper. Note that you will be expected to provide guidance and approve the final comments before the review is submitted.

In general, Sage does not permit the use of author-suggested reviewers. If your journal has an agreement with the Publishing Editor which allows recommended reviewer use then it is essential to adhere to the guidance on the Editor Gateway

Improve time to first and final decision for authors with the following:

Alternate reviewers

Customising invitations, add additional templates.

• Queue invites for multiple suitable reviewers using the ‘Alternates’ function
• Using the Order column, you can move reviewers into the list as ‘Alternate 1’ (or 2, 3, etc. depending on how many people you find) and click ‘Save’
• If anyone from the main reviewer list declines to review, the system will auto-invite from the alternates list
• This saves time as the next reviewer does not have to be manually invited and the invitation is sent out at the earliest possible time.

• A positive response may be more likely if you tailor the invitation to the reviewer
• If there is a specific reason why you are inviting them, then include a note on this toward the beginning of the invitation.
• Reviewer reminders
• Alternative reviewer suggestion for papers with overdue reviewers.

Reviewer Videos:

• How to become a peer reviewer
• How to conduct a peer review
• Peer review ethics

COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers: https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/cope-ethical-guidelines-peer-reviewers

Responsibilities in the Submission and Peer-Review Process: http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/responsibilities-in-the-submission-and-peer-peview-process.html

Peer Review: The Nuts and Bolts: https://senseaboutscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/peer-review-the-nuts-and-bolts.pdf

How to select peer reviewers: Advice from an expert journal editor: https://www.editage.com/insights/how-to-select-peer-reviewers-advice-from-an-expert-journal-editor

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