Editors are busy - they probably have two jobs! - so I think you should wait a while longer. They haven't forgotten you. :-)

Editors are busy - they probably have two jobs! - so I think you should wait a while longer. They haven't forgotten you. :-)

It is my "rule of thumb" to wait three months after submitting a paper and then if I have not heard back, I send a respectful inquiry about the status to the editor.

Michael W. Marek Michael Patriksson Thanks for your suggestion.

My experience says that you would better at least two weeks. Because the journal communicates with the referees at the due time and want them to expedite the process. Usually the journals expands the due time around two weeks.

I have not heard from "regular" journals that they have a policy that means that there is a stipulated upper bound on the time for reviewing. To implement a fixed deadline for the review is a very bad idea. Implementing such a fixed and rigid rule would probably lead me to not submitting manuscripts to any of them, or taking care of reviewing for any of them. For crying out loud - most manuscripts these days are full of holes, that reviewers need to bother with, and plenty of published papers are already incomplete. The reviewers simply MOST have a rather long time to digest the manuscript, and to form a well-founded array of questions and concerns, and because the scientists have a day-job, too, there is no chance that a review, on average, can be done well within a couple of Months! Two weeks is darn impossible, due to the fact that the scientists who have taken on the manuscript also have their own job to do! I have never heard that you can ask for a response within two weeks!! It's bordering on an insult!

Here is a chart of what happens:

First someone at the journal's office look at it. Already it has gone a week, as there is already a pile of unread submissions. Now an associate editor looks at it. She/he browses it, and find that the submission is incomplete, and therefore it is sent back to the submitee, with a note that "you have to re-submit after having made sure that the format of the journal is as it should".

When you have adjusted what was wrong, you submit it again, and after two weeks an associate editor takes care of it. She has two jobs, in academia, and at a publishing house. She reads it a couple of weeks later, but does not finish it, as there is a conference that she has to go to. Two weeks later she gets back to the manuscript, and tries to figure out who to e--mail to ask to be a referee. She sends four e-mails through the submission system, as she knows that plenty of those that she knows are very busy, and some never say "yes".

She gets a response a week later, with a "sorry, but try Dr. X or Y". She does know Dr. X, but have never heard of Dr. Y. She sends an invitation to Dr. X to be a referee.

Dr. X is polite, but is too busy, as she is now a prefect at the university. She then remembers an author, Dr. W, that had a paper in the journal on a related subject, and invites her as well. Dr. W accepts to do the duty.

Several weeks have gone by already, and only now do we have two referees, and yet we need three referees ..

===

So one cannot say that a few weeks is enough! In fact, because of other unforeseen events that I have not mentioned, the process might stall at other places, and because of unforeseen events.

My longest waiting time is something like 11 Months, and I have seen longer time spans than that from other colleagues.

We all say that this is a bad system, but it is still the best one - to ask for a verdict as quickly as a week or two is simply impossible, with all the handling, finding referees, and then perhaps several re-writes and re-submissions.

Without them, do you know how bad it might get? We would have tons of papers that are flawed, full of errors, and perhaps even pseudo-science!

You may communicate with the journal editorial staff members so as to communicate with the deputed reviewers on the assigned reviewing jobs