Manuscript Status

Q: What does a change from "Awaiting editorial decision" to "Awaiting reviewer scores" mean?

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Hi all, I want to ask a quick question related to publication process. I have submitted my paper and the system is ScholarOne Manuscript. So, the status of my paper was "Awaiting reviewer scores" since one month and it turned to "Awaiting editorial decision" last Friday. On the same day, it turned again to "Awaiting reviewer scores." I do understand that probably the editor required one more reviewer as there were conflicting comments. The only issue is, why did it change to "Awaiting reviewer scores" on the same day. If the editor required one more reviewer, it should change to "Awaiting reviewer assignment" first. Has anyone had the same experince? Many thanks in advance.

Asked by James Walker on 23 Apr, 2018

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Typically, in a ScholarOne system, the "Awaiting reviewer assignment" status is shown when invitations have been sent out to reviewers, but reviewers haven't accepted them yet. On the other hand, the status "Awaiting reviewer scores" means that the paper is under review. As you have correctly pointed out, if the editor needed an additional review, he/she would first need to send out reviewer invitations, in which case the status would change to "Awaiting reviewer assignment."

So my guess is that the paper was probably not sent for an additional review. Also, the editor would send the paper for an additional review only after going through the reviews that have come in, which would again take some time. Since the change happened on the same day, I think it must have been a mistake. Possibly, the editor had sent the paper out to more than the minimum requisite number of reviewers.

Say, if two reviewers is the minimum required by the journal, the editor had perhaps sent the paper out to three reviewers at the outset. Now, when two reviews were submitted, the system automatically changed the status to "Awaiting editorial decision" since two is the requisite number of reviews. But probably, since the one extra review hadn't yet come in, the setting was manually changed back to "Awaiting reviewer scores." This seems to me the most plausible explanation of this situation.