Post provided by Dr. Aaron M. Ellison, Executive Editor at Methods in Ecology and Evolution

You’ve worked for months, sometimes years, on developing and testing a new method, and spent a similar amount of time writing the manuscript. It’s finally finished and after navigating the online submission system and uploading and proofing your files, you press the “submit my manuscript” button. Back in the Dark Ages (or at least before Y2K), you could be confident that your manuscript would be reviewed, and that it would take 2–3 months to get those reviews and a first decision on your manuscript. Now, however, it is more likely than not that a manuscript submitted to Methods in Ecology and Evolution, or indeed, to any other reputable journal, will not even be sent out for review. Rather, it will be “desk-rejected” within 24–48 hours by the Editor-in-Chief or another Senior Editor (the current desk-rejection rate at MEE is just under 50%). 

Desk-rejection doesn’t mean that the manuscript is not publishable. Good manuscripts are desk-rejected all the time because they’re simply not in scope for the journal—they’re either too focused on the results, too narrowly focused on a single taxon or system, or, at best, only represent a minor advance on an existing method (Ellison, 2023 provides a summary of what makes for a good Methods paper). Most such manuscripts do get published at other journals and often have high impact in the field.

A separate, more avoidable cause of desk-rejection is that submitted manuscripts are within the scope of the journal but the Senior Editor thinks that the work could be presented better in a type of manuscript that is different from the one that the author submitted. For example, the author submitted a long Research Article manuscript but the Senior Editor thinks it would be better cast as a shorter Applications manuscript. When this happens, the editor returns a “reject/invite a resubmission” decision to the corresponding author. Although this decision is better than an outright desk-rejection, it can still take a lot of time to rework the manuscript from one type into another, especially if the new type is substantially shorter than the original (e.g., reworking a 7500-word Research Article into a 3500-word Applications manuscript). You can avoid this extra time by getting the manuscript type right in the first place.

There are three ways to find out whether your manuscript is in scope for the journal, and, if it is, which type of manuscript would make for the best presentation of the methods: send in a pre-submission inquiry, follow the flowchart below, or ask an editor at the BES Annual Meeting.

1. Send us a presubmission inquiry—An excellent way to get these questions answered is to email a presubmission inquiry to the journal. Presubmission inquiries usually include a 1–2 sentence description of the research, another sentence or two about why you think it would be a good fit for the journal, and the title and abstract of the (potential) manuscript. If there’s already a preprint of the manuscript on, for example, arXiv, bioRxiv, or EcoEvoRxiv, a link to the preprint can also be helpful. However, we don’t get very many presubmission inquiries. For example, in 2025, we received about two presubmission inquiries a week, which is about 10% of the total number of manuscripts submitted to the journal each year. We normally respond to presubmission inquiries within two weeks, and if we respond positively, the likelihood that the full submission will be sent out for review is much higher than for manuscripts for which we did not receive a presubmission inquiry.

2. Follow this flowchart—This is a graphical overview of the more detailed Author Guidelines on the journal’s website. For a high-resolution pdf of this flowchart, click here. The two complement each other, and are best used together. 

3. Ask an editor at the BES Annual Meeting—The last way to get these two questions answered is to come to the speed-review sessions held each year at the BES Annual Meeting. There, Senior Editors answer these questions directly in one-on-one discussions with researchers who sign up (or just show up) to talk about their work with us. There’s normally enough time for about 50 speed-review discussions because all the Senior Editors normally attend the Annual Meeting, the speed-review session runs for 90 minutes, and each speed-review takes about 10 minutes. But in reality, no more than 10 researchers sign up or show up to talk about their work in a speed-review session. The ones who do sign up usually are early-career researchers thinking about submitting their first manuscript, and those who do follow up with a submission have a high likelihood of getting their manuscript reviewed and published in the journal. 

Whether you follow the flowchart, send us a presubmission inquiry, or talk to us at the BES annual meeting, you can be assured that any manuscript you choose to send us will be read and carefully evaluated by one or more editors at the journal. All of us at Methods in Ecology and Evolution look forward to reading your manuscript and learning about what new methods you’re working on!