Q: What does it mean if the status has been Awaiting Reviewer Scores for four weeks - and what should I do?

Awaiting Reviewer Scores means that your paper is being peer reviewed. As you may know, peer review can take a while, as peer reviewers do this along with their other work. So, one can’t really put a timeline to it. Also, one reviewer may send their comments on time or earlier, and the other(s) may take a while to get back. However, as you submitted your paper six weeks ago and it moved to peer review in two weeks, this seems to be a rapid publication journal. So, you could wait another week or so and then drop a mail to the editor requesting an update.

For help with communicating with the journal in various scenarios, you may find this handbook useful: A practical handbook of templates for communicating with the journal [Note: It’s from R Upskill, a sibling brand offering courses for a variety of researcher needs, from writing to handling peer review comments to promoting your research. So, do check it out.]

Hope that helps. All the best for the next stages on your manuscript!

For more on the Awaiting Reviewer Scores status, you may find it helpful to go through these previous queries by other researchers:

• What does the status 'Awaiting reviewer scores' without assigning GE mean?
• What are the indicators of acceptance in highly trusted journals, and what does 'Awaiting reviewer scores' mean?