Q: I had submitted a paper. For six months it was in "Under Review." Now the status has changed to "reviewers assigned".

Dear Author,

Thank you for writing to us. We understand that you must be very anxious regarding the status of your manuscript.

The manuscript status changing back to “reviewers assigned” may be due to one of following reason

1. Some of the reviewers that initially accepted to review the manuscript have now declined to review it due to their availability. Therefore, the Assigned Editor (AE) has now sent the manuscript back for peer review with a new set of reviewers.

2. Some of the reviewers possibly sent the manuscript back with their comments (may be the comments were incomplete, superficial, lacked any scientific rigor, or were inappropriate) and therefore the AE not being satisfied with the reviewers’ comments, has now sent the manuscript back for peer review possibly with a different set of reviewers.

3. Could have been technical problem with the submission system as well (very rare to see these though).

Since its already been more than 5 months since submission we highly recommend you write to the Editor-in-Chief, to check and provide an update on the status of the manuscript as well the tentative timeline to complete the peer review.

We hope you receive a prompt response from the journal.