Q: Can I send an inquiry to the journal if my paper's status has remained "Decision pending" for 13 days?

Detailed Question -

I am a 2nd year PhD student (starting my 3rd year soon). For the past 7 months, I've been struggling with finding an appropriate journal for my (hopefully) first article. I had to deal with many journal desk-rejections, in which 90% of those were because the paper was out of scope. However, one journal suggested that we need to improve the paper. Of course, we followed the advice (+1 month on the same manuscript).

Now a journal has accepted to review our paper, and here are the status changes of the paper:

"Under review" - 43 days

"Ready for Decision"- 6 days

"Decision Pending" - 13 Days

I don't know if I should send the Editorial Team a polite reminder, because many similar threads say that that I should wait a little longer, but considering my circumstances (the context that I've described earlier), I feel that I've wasted a lot of time on this one project.

 

Thank you for your suggestion.

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

From your question, it is clear that the status of your manuscript has changed from “Under review” to “Ready for decision” and presently the status on the submission system is “Decision pending”. Once a manuscript is submitted to a journal, the journal editor carries out a preliminary assessment before sending it to external peer reviewers. Based on the reviewers’ comments the editor takes the final decision.

 

In your case, it seems that the manuscript has cleared the editorial assessment and has already undergone a peer review. It is likely that the editor is assessing the peer review comments and will arrive at a decision regarding your manuscript soon.

 

I understand that you urgently need to get your manuscript accepted in a journal. In this situation, you can send a follow-up email to the journal to have a clear picture of the progress. You should receive the final decision soon.

 

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