Q: Why is the status of my submission to Nature Physics only 'Manuscript Received' after 14 days?

Detailed Question -

I submitted a paper to Nature Physics 14 days ago. Why is the status of my paper only ‘Manuscript Received’ till now? Two days ago, I sent a message to the journal but there was no reply.

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

Hello. Thanks for writing in again. We trust you would have seen our responses to your earlier queries around this paper, here and here, along with the related resources we provided as links in the initial response. Again, as you would well know, Nature Physics is a very well-established journal receiving a lot of manuscripts regularly, which takes time processing. Based on this, it may sometimes well be three weeks before they do an initial processing on your paper. For insights into the work lives of journal editors and how they process papers after submission, you may go through the following resources:

As you’ve already written to them now (and haven’t received a response), you could wait for some more time for further information and communication.

For now, we would suggest either or both of two paths. Based on the perspectives provided above and in our earlier responses, we would urge you to be a bit more patient about the submission. If however there is a pressing need for you to know the fate of this submission (such as an academic or professional dependency), and you can’t let it “hang” any longer at Nature Physics, we would suggest withdrawing the manuscript and submitting to another journal. In that case, for a smoother withdrawal and submission (to another journal), we would urge you to go through the to-dos described in this resource: Should I withdraw my paper if the journal is taking unusually long to process?

For future submissions, we would also like to inform you of our new AI-powered submission and showcase platform, R Pubsure. R Pubsure is meant to help authors minimize the chances of a desk rejection. It does this first through machine-based checks on your manuscript, allowing you to improve it and make it submission-ready. Then, it allows you to showcase your ready manuscript to multiple journal editors, one of whom may consider it for publishing in their journal, if of course they find it interesting and relevant. You may find out more about the platform: R Pubsure

Hope all this helps. :-)