A boom in manuscript submissions

It is not uncommon for manuscript submission levels to vary depending on external circumstances. For example, during the Covid pandemic, submissions increased significantly as researchers cleared out their unpublished data. That was followed by a small dip in submissions last year, again related to the pandemic—perhaps due to a time lag between renewal of experimentation and publication.

We are now out of that dip and have seen a startling increase in submissions over the past year, to the point where all of our editors are maxed out. Many of our Associate Editors (AEs) have over 10 manuscripts in their system at the moment, beyond anyone's expectations.

For historical perspective, the table shows the submission trends since 2015. There was a general, slow increase and then a plateau between 2015 and 2019. During Covid, starting in 2020, everyone was writing up old research and new reviews as a means of keeping busy, so submissions trended upward. But then in 2022, we had a “Covid dip,” perhaps because researchers were once more getting back into the lab to generate data and not necessarily writing as much. The number of submissions rose last year, to 1941, about where we were in 2016. There was an average of five manuscripts submitted per day last year. As of September 5, this year, we already have 1952 submissions, with an average daily rate of 7.8. At this pace, we expect to see a record number of submissions, even above the Covid years. If submissions continue at this rate, we project over 2800 manuscript submissions this year.

We are scratching our head trying to understand what is driving this increase. It is not just us, though; many journals are seeing this increase. We hear that other publishers and journals are seeing an increase in submissions of 18%–20%. Our increase will likely be greater than that, maybe as much 35% over the 2023 submissions (and still 6% greater than our boom year in 2021).

One of our contacts postulated that this spike could be the result of authors choosing to publish in journals long known to uphold high standards of research integrity, such as society journals. They stated that authors appear to be moving away from Frontiers, MDPI, the former Hindawi journals, and other born-OA publishers who were hit hard by paper mills, AI-generated, and poorly reviewed papers.

What this boom has meant to us is that the entire editorial staff is overwhelmed. The Scientific Editors (SEs) have many more papers to assign, to the same AEs, who are all overloaded. Finding reviewers for all these submissions requires an ever-expanding pool of willing reviewers. In response to this surge in submissions, we have recently added one new SE and five new AEs. We will be evaluating candidates for Editorial Board (EB) members-at-large as we close out the year, with hopes of adding up to 10 new people, selected based on all the factors discussed in my March and April editorials. Specifically, we will be seeking to enhance our diversity while maintaining the necessary expertise.

If you are a good candidate to join the EB, or know of someone who would be, please contact me at [email protected] by early December so we can add names to our pool of candidates. We will be evaluating all candidates, whether self-nominated or nominated by someone else, with a January start date in mind.

Sincerely,

Rich Hartel, PhD

Editor in Chief, Journal of Food

Science

Professor, University of

Wisconsin–Madison