Image: Frances Pepper and Elizabeth Smith work in the offices of The Suffragist, the weekly journal published by the Congressional Union and National Woman's Party from 1913 to 1921 - Harris & Ewing, photographers (via Library of Congress)

We all know that the rise of electronic publishing has transformed academic journals. But academics haven’t focused much attention on the emergence of online submission systems, which have also served to transform academic publishing in subtle ways.

On the positive side, they have made managing manuscripts far easier. In fact, I’m amazed anything got published at all in the Olden Days (circa 1995), given the complicated logistics of managing the review process. Likewise, online submission systems have also made the review process more transparent. I don’t necessarily mean in a literal sense — most reviews are still single- or double-blinded (that’s another debate altogether) — but in a procedural sense.

Prior to becoming a journal editor myself five years ago, I gave little thought to the logistics of submitting journal articles. Like most people I wrote papers, submitted them, and then crossed my fingers for a successful outcome — wondering intermittently how they were faring but not really giving the process any further thought until the reviews came back. But once I took on an editorial role, I realized just how much information authors now have at their fingertips when they submit a paper — information of which they are not necessarily aware, which is exactly how journal editors prefer it.

I feel a bit like I’m revealing trade secrets here (although the information is fairly self-evident to anyone who stops and thinks about it), but you are given two invaluable pieces of information when you submit a manuscript via an online platform like ScholarOne:

• A number you are assigned upon submission.

• Automated status updates on your manuscript.

Why your manuscript number is important. Most academics give very little thought to that number, but it actually provides you with some useful information. Many online submission systems — by “many,” I mean manuscripts submitted through ScholarOne and Elsevier’s online platform, although I suspect the same holds true for other platforms — assign new manuscripts a variation of the following code: [series of letters]-[series of numbers]-[more numbers]. The first part of the code identifies the journal, the second part of the code identifies the year the manuscript was submitted (e.g., “2016” or “16”) and the final part of the code tells you your place in line.

In other words, the code tells you how many manuscripts have been submitted to the journal in the year so far. Why is that information important?

Because it gives you an indication of the journal’s volume of submissions. Basically, a journal with a healthy submission rate should have a backlog of at least a year’s worth of accepted papers. The figure will vary from journal to journal, and will largely depend on the number of issues it publishes in any given year. For example, a journal with only two issues a year, with seven to eight papers published in each, clearly needs a much smaller backlog than one that publishes five issues annually.

So if you submit a manuscript in, say, July, to a journal that publishes four issues a year and your manuscript submission number ends in 0012, then your paper is basically the 12th submission the journal has received that year — which is significantly lower than that figure should ideally be. If, on the other hand, your number ends in 1053, then you know that you are dealing with a journal that receives a massive volume of submissions.

In case the implications aren’t obvious, let me spell them out for you: A journal with a small volume of submissions can’t afford to be as picky in accepting submissions (even if its editors would like to be) as one of the heavy hitters. Now, as I noted in a previous post, that doesn’t mean those editors will publish any old crap, but it does potentially mean your manuscript is less likely to be rejected out of hand.

So pay attention to your manuscript number. Once I started doing so myself, I found that my assumptions about any given journal’s volume of submissions were often quite far off base — some journals had a far higher volume of submissions than I’d ever dreamed and others were much lower. In some cases, there was a clear correlation between journal prestige and submission volume, but that wasn’t universally true.

Why status updates on your manuscript are important. Until relatively recently, scholars submitted a manuscript and waited — sometimes years — for a decision (actually, that is still the case for some journals). The review process was a black hole that your manuscript got sucked into until it finally made its way out the other side.

Online submission platforms changed everything. Suddenly, editors could track the status of manuscripts far more easily — and so, too, could authors. But as I stated at the outset, most authors today continue to treat their manuscript as if we were still in 1996 rather 2016. They submit it via a journal’s online system and then never bother entering the system again until they’ve received a final decision and are ready to resubmit.

In fact, online submission systems have made the review process far more transparent — too transparent, from the perspective of editors, because the systems typically let writers know where their manuscript is in the review process and where the bottlenecks are.

Different systems use different terms but, after you submit a manuscript, its initial status is typically something like “submitted” or “being processed” or “with editor.” If your manuscript is screened before being sent out for review, then its status won’t change until the editor has had a chance to look at it. If its status still hasn’t changed a month after submission, then you know you’re dealing with a relatively slow editor. Once the editor has viewed your manuscript, its status will ideally change to something like “awaiting reviewer selection” or “under review.” That generally means it has passed through the screening phase and is being sent out for external review. However, if its status changes to “awaiting editorial decision,” that likely means you can expect a decision of “reject” shortly, because the editor has elected not to send it out for review.

Once the manuscript has been sent to external reviewers, you’ll get a sense of how long the review process itself takes because — after the reviews are in — its status will change to something along the lines of “required reviews completed” or “awaiting editorial decision” (and you should expect that decision in the next few weeks and can plan your schedule accordingly). If the manuscript is listed as “under review” for six months, you know that you’re dealing with slow reviewers or that the editor has had difficulty finding them — or both. However, if after three months the status changes from “under review” to “awaiting editorial decision” and it still takes six months to get a decision (I have seen that happen as both an author and reviewer), then the editor is the hold up.

Now, I’m not telling you this to encourage you to obsessively track your manuscript and send the editor harassing emails every few weeks. Well, you can do the former if you wish but the latter is never a good idea. Bear in mind: Most editors are busy academics themselves and many receive little — if any — financial remuneration for the work they do (that may not be the case for big science and medical journals).

But if the status of your manuscript has stayed the same for three months, especially if it’s listed as “awaiting editorial decision” for that entire period, a politely worded email to the editor asking for an update is definitely warranted. This kind of information is probably most useful in helping you to determine whether you want to submit to the journal again.

An unfortunate fact of life is that tenure-and-promotion cases can sometimes hinge on journal turnaround times (i.e., the number of papers you have “in press” versus “under review”). Personally, I’m a little perturbed by the growing fetishization of those stats (amongst many other so-called aspects of journal quality like the “impact factor”) but the emphasis on those figures is a reflection of the fetishization of publication output in academia itself. While I could easily rant about the state of academic publishing for hours, I recognize that it’s useful to be aware of which journals have editors who aren’t on the ball, especially given that academics are now spoilt for choice in terms of the sheer volume of journals in their given field (a fact, by the way, that journal editors are typically well aware of).

In sum, the mechanical transparency that online submission systems have engendered means you are given various cues that put your paper in context — both in terms of the broader volume of submissions the journal receives and what’s happening to it as it travels through the review process itself. Those cues, in turn, provide useful information: how your manuscript is likely to fare in the review process itself, when you are likely to receive a decision, and whether it would be wise to return to the journal in the future.