Buildings Submission Guide: MDPI Process (2026)

Buildings is not a weaker version of the high-impact Elsevier building journals, and it is not a stronger one. It is a different model. MDPI built it around speed and soundness-based review: the editorial question is whether the work is methodologically sound and within a defined section, not whether it ranks among the most cited building studies of the year. That model shapes everything about how you prepare the package.

Two consequences matter most. First, the journal is section-based, organized by subfield, so scope fit is assessed against a specific section such as Building Structures, Building Energy/Physics/Environment and Systems, or Construction Management and Computers and Digitization, rather than against a vague "is this interesting" bar. Second, the pre-check is fast and partly template-driven, so completeness and clear scope are rewarded and ambiguity is punished early.

A sophisticated finite-element study the section editor cannot place, or one whose model is never checked against real data, can be returned before a reviewer ever sees it, while a competent, complete, in-scope study with a validation step moves quickly.

The journal is broad on purpose. It spans structural engineering, building energy and physics, indoor environmental quality, construction management, building information modeling, and architectural design, as long as the building or the built environment is the actual subject. That breadth is the upside and the trap: it is wide enough to host most building research, but the breadth is what makes scope drift the single most common reason a section editor cannot place a paper.

The core fit for most submissions is the original research article. It works best when the building question is central, the methods are reproducible from the text, any model is validated, and the declarations and reporting package are complete on first upload.

Ask these questions before you submit:

• is the building, the built environment, or the construction process the actual subject, or is the building a downstream application of a materials or mechanics finding?
• is every simulated or modeled result anchored to experimental, monitored, or measured data?
• can a reader reproduce the methods, the model setup, and the boundary conditions from the manuscript and supplementary files alone?
• does the paper state honestly what a single building, single climate, or single test setup can and cannot generalize to?

If the answers are uncertain, the pre-check problem is usually more important than the modeling problem.

The pre-check editor is answering a short list of questions fast.

On scope, the editor asks whether the manuscript belongs in a building-science journal and in which section. If the building relevance is thin, or the paper is really a concrete-chemistry study or a structural-mechanics derivation with a building example bolted on, it is redirected or returned. On soundness, the question is whether the methods are reproducible and the analysis appropriate, and whether any model rests on real-world evidence.

Buildings does not require the finding to be field-defining, but it does require the work to be done correctly, validated, and reported in full.

On integrity, the editor checks ethics approvals where human participants are involved, image and data integrity, and the data availability statement. MDPI runs integrity and plagiarism checks at pre-check, and gaps here trigger fast returns. On completeness, the editor looks for the declarations block. A manuscript missing Author Contributions, Funding, or Conflicts of Interest reads as not ready, even when the engineering is fine.

The reviewer, once the paper clears pre-check, almost always asks the same first question for a modeling paper: what is this validated against? A simulation paper that cannot answer that question in the first reviewer round draws the most predictable revision request at Buildings and its open-access peers.

Manuscript structure: Buildings expects a defined section set: Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, plus the declarations block. The abstract should be a single paragraph of about 200 words, and the introduction needs to make the building-science question, and the section it belongs to, visible in the first paragraph. The abstract is the first thing the pre-check editor reads, so the building angle and the validation approach both need to be legible there.

Validation and methods readiness: Provide full model setup, mesh or grid detail, boundary conditions, material properties, and solver settings so a finite-element, CFD, or energy-simulation result can be reproduced. State explicitly what the model is validated against: a physical test, a monitored building, a measured dataset, or a published benchmark. A simulation-only paper with no validation anchor is the single highest-leverage thing to fix before submission, because it is the friction point both pre-check and the first reviewer reach fastest.

Declarations and ethics: Draft the Author Contributions (by initials), Funding, Data Availability, and Conflicts of Interest sections before you upload. Where the study involves human participants, occupant surveys, or post-occupancy interviews, the Institutional Review Board statement and informed-consent language are pre-check gates at MDPI, not post-acceptance paperwork.

Figures, supplementary, graphical abstract, and datasets: A graphical abstract is optional but commonly used; if supplied, it should be a high-resolution PNG, JPEG, or TIFF. Supplementary materials should carry the detail that would slow the main narrative: the full FEM input deck, the energy-model IDF or gbXML file, the structural-test load logs, the BIM model description, or the raw building-monitoring time series. ORCID is expected for the submitting author, and the SuSy system will ask for suggested reviewers in the relevant building-science subfield.

In our pre-submission review work with Buildings manuscripts, four failure patterns generate the most consistent pre-check returns and reviewer friction, and each is testable against your own manuscript before you upload.

Across our building-engineering pre-submission reviews, the pattern that surprises authors most is that the Buildings pre-check is not a quality filter in the Nature sense; it is a fit-and-validation filter. The manuscripts that get returned fastest are rarely careless. They are competent studies whose scope the section editor cannot place, or whose central claim rests on a model nobody has checked against the real world. Manuscripts coming through pre-submission review for Buildings split cleanly along these four lines.

Scope drift into pure materials or pure structural mechanics

The most common pattern we see is a manuscript whose real subject is a material or a mechanics derivation, with a building used only as the example. A concrete-mix or asphalt-durability study with a thin "applied to buildings" framing belongs in Construction and Building Materials; a closed-form stress-field derivation with no building system around it belongs in a structural-mechanics journal.

Buildings is section-based, so the pre-check editor has to place the manuscript in a section like Building Structures or Building Energy and Physics. When the actual contribution is to materials chemistry or to mechanics theory rather than to the building, the section assignment fails and the paper is returned or redirected fast. The testable version: read your own abstract and ask whether a section editor could name the Buildings section from the first paragraph alone.

If the building only appears as a use case in the discussion, the framing is too thin, and the fix is to rebuild the introduction and abstract around the building-system question, or to redirect the paper to the specialist journal where it actually fits.

Check whether your Buildings scope angle maps to a journal section →

Simulation-only studies with no experimental or field validation

The second pattern is a finite-element, CFD, or building-energy-simulation paper whose results are never anchored to physical reality. We repeatedly see structural FEM models validated only against a different FEM, energy-simulation papers that report predicted savings with no measured baseline, and thermal-comfort CFD with no sensor data to check the predicted field against. At a soundness-based journal, an unvalidated model is not a finding; it is a hypothesis.

Reviewers in building science almost always ask, in the first round, what the model is validated against, and a paper with no answer draws a major revision or a reject. The testable version: for every quantitative claim that comes out of a simulation, identify the experimental test, monitored building, measured dataset, or published benchmark that confirms it, and state that validation explicitly in the Methods and Results.

If the only validation is "the model converged" or "results agree with the literature trend," the validation is not there yet.

Check whether your Buildings simulation has a validation anchor →

A single-building case study framed as a general finding

The third pattern is a one-site study that overclaims. A retrofit measured in one office tower, a monitoring campaign on one school, or a structural-health-monitoring dataset from one bridge-adjacent building is a legitimate contribution, but only when the manuscript states honestly what one building, one climate zone, or one structural system can and cannot generalize to.

We see introductions and conclusions that present a single-case result as a universal design rule, which invites a reviewer to reject on external validity alone. The testable version: read your conclusions and abstract, and flag every sentence that generalizes beyond your sample. Either supply the evidence that supports the generalization, more buildings, a sensitivity analysis across climates, or a comparison to published cases, or scope the claim down to what one case actually demonstrates.

Buildings will publish a strong single-case study; it returns a single-case study that pretends to be a population study.

Check whether your Buildings case study scopes its claims honestly →

Incremental parameter sweeps with no new insight

The fourth pattern shows up at the reviewer stage rather than pre-check, and it is the "one more variable" study: an existing model or experiment rerun across a slightly different parameter range, wall thickness, glazing ratio, reinforcement spacing, or occupancy schedule, with no new mechanism, no design guidance, and no transferable conclusion.

The results table is complete and the figures are clean, but the reviewer cannot find what the field learns that it did not already know. In building science, where so much work is parametric by nature, this is the pattern reviewers are most primed to flag. The testable version: write one sentence stating what a practitioner or researcher should do differently because of your study.

If the only honest answer is "now we also know the value at this parameter setting," the contribution is incremental, and the fix is to extract a generalizable relationship, a design recommendation, or a mechanism from the sweep rather than reporting the sweep itself.

Each of these is something you can check against your own draft before you commit the submission. This guide tells you what Buildings editors and reviewers look for; the review tells you whether YOUR paper passes the pre-check and the first reviewer's validation question before you upload. We have reviewed 70+ manuscripts targeting building-science and construction-engineering journals, including Buildings and its high-impact peers.

Paid Manusights reviews include a 60-day money-back guarantee, and we do not train models on submitted manuscripts. Run a Buildings submission package check to see whether your scope angle, validation strategy, and declarations block will clear the MDPI pre-check.

Buildings reports a median first decision near 15 days and median acceptance-to-publication near 2.9 days for papers published in the second half of 2025. Treat these as planning ranges, not promises: structural-monitoring and large field-measurement manuscripts often run longer because reviewer search takes time in specialized subfields.

• Day 0: Submission via SuSy. The portal accepts the package and routes it to the section editor for pre-check.

• Days 1 to 3: Editorial pre-check. The editor screens section-scope fit, ethics completeness, integrity and plagiarism checks, and basic soundness.

The fastest returns happen here, before any reviewer is invited.

• Days 3 to 7: Reviewer invitation. Manuscripts that pass pre-check enter single-blind reviewer search, typically targeting two or more reviewers in the relevant building-science subfield.

• Days 7 to 15: Peer review and first decision. Reviewer reports return and the editor issues the first decision, with a median near 15 days from submission.

Major revision is the most common outcome for papers that clear pre-check, and the validation question is the most common revision request for modeling papers.

• Days 15 to 30: Revision and acceptance. Revisions are usually requested on a short clock; resubmission and a second review cycle commonly land acceptance inside a few weeks for in-scope, complete, validated packages.

• **Days 30 to 33:

Production and publication.** Acceptance to publication runs near 2.9 days at median, so the slow part of the calendar is reviewer search and revision, not production.

This guide was researched and built from primary sources: the sources we checked include the Buildings Instructions for Authors, the journal's aims-and-scope, sections, and editorial-process pages, MDPI's research and publication ethics policy, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from building-science and construction-engineering manuscripts deciding between Buildings and peer journals. We reviewed and compared current MDPI author guidance with recent Manusights work reviews from authors weighing Buildings, Journal of Building Engineering, Energy and Buildings, Building and Environment, and Construction and Building Materials. Last reviewed by the Manusights engineering editorial team on 2026-06-07.

Source limitations: MDPI can update APC, article-format details, abstract caps, and editorial-process numbers after this review date, and the comparison table mixes MDPI-reported and Clarivate-reported figures, so verify the final citation metric, APC, and administrative details against the official Buildings author pages and the current JCR before upload. Median timelines are reported by the journal and vary by subfield. Use this guide for the decision the official instructions cannot answer: whether your scope angle, validation strategy, and reporting compliance are ready for the MDPI pre-check.

• Buildings journal profile and metrics
• Construction and Building Materials journal metrics
• Is Construction and Building Materials a good journal?
• Energy and Buildings submission guide
• Rejected from Construction and Building Materials, where next?

Before you upload, run your manuscript through a Buildings submission readiness check to catch the scope, validation, and reporting gaps the MDPI pre-check filters for. The check is free to run (/ai-review) and takes a single upload.