Manuscript screening for journals and editorial teams
Screen every submission against your own guidelines, not generic standards, before it reaches a handling editor: required sections, reference integrity, figures and tables, author metadata, word limits. Your editors then open a file with the mechanical questions already answered, and spend the read on novelty, soundness and scope, which stay theirs to judge.
Desk review spends its time on the mechanical part
Before a manuscript reaches a handling editor, someone has to open it and answer a set of questions that have nothing to do with the science. Is the reference list complete, and does every citation in the text have an entry behind it. Are the figures that the text refers to actually in the file. Is there a corresponding author with a working affiliation. Is the funding statement filled in rather than left as a placeholder. And then, separately, the one question that genuinely needs an editor: does this paper belong in this journal at all.
None of that is hard. It is slow, it happens one manuscript at a time, and it consumes the attention of the people who should be reading for scope and contribution. It is also uneven: two editors working through the same queue apply the same guidelines with different thresholds and different levels of patience, and an author cannot tell which one they got.
The part that can be automated is the checkable part: presence, completeness, internal consistency. Scope fit, novelty and methodological soundness are not on that list and will not be. Separating the two is what this page is about.
What the screening catches
A manuscript goes in as PDF or Word and a report comes back in about 5 minutes. Read from the receiving side, here is what it settles before a manuscript reaches a handling editor.
Citations and References
Catch incomplete reference lists before an editor opens the file: citations with no matching entry, entries with no citation, missing authors or years, and DOIs that do not resolve to the reference given.
Manuscript Structure
See whether the submission has the sections your workflow expects, in a sensible order, before it is assigned to a handling editor.
Figures and Tables
Find figures and tables cited in the text but absent from the file, visuals that are never cited, reused captions and numbering that runs out of sequence.
Metadata and Authors
Check the submission metadata an editorial office chases by email: corresponding author, affiliations and consistent author naming across the document.
Title and Abstract
Read the title and abstract against the length and content conventions a desk reviewer applies from memory.
Funding Statements
Verify that a funding statement is present and that grant numbers and agency names are actually filled in.
Acronyms
Flag abbreviations used before they are defined and terms written three different ways across a single manuscript.
Language and Writing Quality
Separate a language problem from a science problem, so a manuscript is not desk rejected for the first when the second is sound.
The quickest way to judge it is to run it on a manuscript you have already handled and compare the report with what your desk review found. See a sample report.
How access works
The editorial version is not open to sign-up. It runs with a small number of partner journals, and access is granted one journal at a time. That is deliberate rather than a queue: your guidelines have to be gone through rule by rule before screening can run against them, and that is work we do with you, not a form you fill in.
The self-serve product stays open to anyone: one manuscript, one report, $5, no account. Editors use it that way every day, and it is the fastest way to see what the checks actually catch. The editorial version is the same engine operated for a journal rather than for an author.
What partner journals get
Partner journals submit in batches, screen against their own submission guidelines rather than generic standards, and share the reports across the editorial team. Access is limited and granted journal by journal.
- Batch upload
- You hand over a set of submissions at once instead of one file at a time. The reports come back as a batch, so an editorial assistant works through a whole intake in a single sitting instead of chasing files one by one.
- Shared team access
- Reports go to the whole editorial team rather than to one person's inbox, so a manuscript screened by one editor is not screened again by the next, and the handling editor has the report sitting with the submission.
- Your own submission guidelines
- We go through your guidelines with you rule by rule and tell you which ones can be checked automatically and which ones stay with your editors. No tool can verify that a paper fits your scope, is novel, or is methodologically sound, and drawing that line in writing is part of the work. Screening then runs against your rules rather than against generic publishing standards.
Partner journals get a say in what gets built and in what order, and they get terms that reflect having been there first. Small and mid-sized journals are the ones we want in the room, because their desk review load is the one that a couple of people carry personally.
Request access for your journal
One email: your journal, roughly how many submissions a year, and where desk review hurts most. We reply with an honest answer on whether this is useful to you.
Frequently asked questions
What editors ask us first, including the things we do not do. Drop us a note if your question is not here.
Yes. Your guidelines become the rule set the screening runs against, instead of generic publishing standards. Word limits, required sections and their order, reference and citation formatting, keyword rules, caption requirements, acronym conventions: all of it screens against your version. Anything the engine does not cover yet is flagged rather than dropped, and whether a paper belongs in your journal stays yours to judge.