International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer Submission Guide: How to Submit to IJHMT (Elsevier)

The journal publishes full-length articles, short communications, letters to the editor, and discussions of previously published papers, plus invited reviews. The format you choose drives the expectations that apply.

Full-length articles carry a real length ceiling that surprises authors who assume Elsevier journals are open-ended: research papers should not exceed 40 equivalent pages, formatted to 1.5 spacing and 12-point font, with each figure or table counted as one equivalent page.

That cap is more generous than a word count but it is enforced, and a manuscript that runs to 60 equivalent pages because it carries 30 figures is questioned for whether the author could decide what the contribution was. Abstracts should be concise, in the range of 200 words, and written as a self-contained statement of the transfer-process advance rather than a topic introduction.

Short communications and letters exist for compact, time-sensitive results. A short communication that needs full Methods, Results, and Discussion sections to make its case is structurally a full-length article wearing the wrong label.

Every submission needs three to five highlights, each no more than 85 characters including spaces. Highlights are not a throwaway field at this journal. They are the first thing an editor reads after the title, and a highlight that restates the abstract topic instead of naming the transfer-process advance signals a weak contribution before the editor opens the PDF.

Authors must also supply a cover letter, a declaration of competing interests, a data availability statement, a CRediT author-contributions statement, funding information, and ORCID iDs. A graphical abstract is encouraged. Manuscripts that are unclear because of English-language quality can be returned for rewrite before review, so the language bar is enforced at triage, not deferred.

Before the article type and declarations are locked, an International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer submission readiness check can confirm whether the highlights name a real advance and whether the work fits a full-length article or a short communication.

The journal assigns submissions to an editor who first decides suitability, then routes suitable manuscripts to a minimum of two reviewers. Community-reported data from SciRev puts the first review round near five months, with about 2.2 reports per round and around 1.6 rounds before a final decision. Treat the stages below as planning ranges, not commitments, and note that slow handling is a recurring author complaint at this journal.

• Day 0: Submission and PDF build. Editorial Manager ingests your files and builds a merged PDF. You approve it, confirm the data availability statement, highlights, and declarations, and submit.

• Days 1 to 2: Editorial suitability screen. An editor checks scope fit, article-type compliance, completeness, and language quality. The fastest returns happen here: immediately rejected manuscripts get a decision in about two days.

Out-of-scope work, unsolicited reviews, and language-quality returns rarely reach a reviewer.

• Days 2 to 14: Reviewer assignment. The handling editor decides whether to send the manuscript out and invites a minimum of two reviewers. Numerical papers without grid-independence evidence and experimental papers without uncertainty analysis are commonly returned at this stage, before external review.

• Days 14 to 150: Peer review. Reports return, typically about 2.2 per round, on a multi-week cadence.

The first round commonly runs to roughly five months, though subfield and reviewer load shift this materially.

• Months 5 to 6: Decision and revision. Reject, major revision, minor revision, or accept. A revised manuscript must be accompanied by a point-by-point response letter.

Most papers that pass review go through at least one revision round before acceptance.

• Months 6 and beyond: Final decision and production. Total handling time runs to roughly 5.6 months on average, with longer outcomes for multi-round submissions.

In our pre-submission review work with International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer manuscripts, four patterns generate the most consistent early returns. None of them are about the physics being wrong. They are about evidence packaging and contribution framing that this journal screens for before peer review begins.

In our review of thermal-sciences manuscripts, each of these is a named rejection pattern you can check your own draft against, and each reflects an editorial triage pattern specific to how editors at this journal read submissions. The single-anonymized review and the journal's emphasis on fundamental transfer-process understanding raise the stakes on every one of these. Editors consistently screen for these before sending a manuscript out for review.

The International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer guide for authors defines the mechanics below; the patterns describe how manuscripts coming through pre-submission review for this journal most often fall short of them. SciRev community data on this journal, where authors report a first review round near five months and about 2.2 reports per submission, is consistent with what we see: a large share of attrition happens at the editorial suitability screen, before reviewers ever weigh in, and these four patterns are why.

Numerical results presented without grid-independence or verification evidence. A large share of International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer submissions are computational, and the single most common stall we see on numerical manuscripts is a results section that reports Nusselt numbers, friction factors, temperature fields, or spectra without demonstrating that the solution is grid-independent or that the numerical method was verified.

The figures look complete, but an editor in this field reads them and asks the obvious question: how do I know this is resolved rather than under-resolved? When the manuscript has no grid-convergence study, no time-step sensitivity check, and no comparison against a known benchmark or analytical limit, the verification gap is visible immediately.

This journal expects numerical work to stand on demonstrated convergence, and manuscripts that treat convergence as assumed rather than shown are a leading reason computational papers are returned before external review.

Check whether your International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer numerical results show grid independence

Experimental results missing a clear uncertainty and error analysis. On the experimental side, the parallel failure is a measurement reported without an uncertainty budget. The paper presents heat transfer coefficients, temperature distributions, or flow-visualization results, but the error analysis is either absent or reduced to a single sentence.

Reviewers in heat and mass transfer treat uncertainty quantification as part of the result, not an appendix to it, so a figure with no error bars, no statement of measurement uncertainty, and no discussion of repeatability reads as incomplete.

The methods section is where this is decided: if the apparatus, calibration, and uncertainty propagation are not described well enough for a reader to judge confidence in the reported coefficients, the manuscript is not yet ready for this journal regardless of how clean the data look.

Incremental correlation studies that add no fundamental understanding. This is the failure mode most specific to the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, and it is the one that surprises authors coming from more applied venues. The journal's mission centers on increasing the basic understanding of transfer processes.

A manuscript that runs a parametric study, fits a new Nusselt-Reynolds-Prandtl correlation for a slightly different geometry or fluid, and stops there is exactly the shape that gets returned. The data may be sound and the curve fit may be tight, but if the contribution is a correlation with no new physical insight into the mechanism, an editor reads it as incremental. The fix is not more data points.

It is a discussion that explains why the transfer process behaves the way the data show, what mechanism drives it, and what the result changes about how the field understands the process. A correlation without that interpretive layer is the canonical near-miss here.

Scope framed as heat and mass transfer when the core is elsewhere. The journal sits at a busy intersection, and two scope drifts are common. One direction is pure fluid mechanics: a manuscript whose real contribution is a turbulence or flow-instability result with heat transfer added as a thin downstream measurement.

The other is pure applied engineering: a device, exchanger, or system optimization where the transfer process is a fixed input rather than the object of study, which reads as Applied Thermal Engineering territory. Editors at this journal are transfer-process specialists, and they identify quickly when the heat or mass transfer is the setting rather than the subject.

A manuscript whose genuine advance would be evaluated more naturally by a fluid-dynamics or applied-thermal reviewer is consistently flagged as a scope mismatch before review.

This guide tells you what International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer editors look for; a Manusights review tells you whether YOUR paper passes that screen. A Manusights review checks the grid-independence evidence, the uncertainty analysis, the contribution framing, and the scope against the editorial bar this journal applies before peer review. Paid Manusights reviews include a 60-day money-back guarantee, and we do not train models on submitted manuscripts.

Before submitting, an International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer verification and scope readiness check tests whether your convergence evidence, uncertainty analysis, and contribution framing clear the editorial bar this journal applies before peer review.

This guide was built from the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer guide for authors, Elsevier's Editorial Manager submission system, the journal's stated transfer-process mission, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from thermal-sciences manuscripts. We checked the article types, the highlights requirement, the single-anonymized review model, and the data availability requirement against the journal's own pages, and we cross-checked review-timing ranges against SciRev community data and Clarivate JCR 2024 metrics. The failure patterns describe what we see most often when heat-and-mass-transfer manuscripts come through pre-submission review for this journal.

Use this page before you upload, when the official instructions cannot answer the real question: whether your verification evidence, uncertainty analysis, contribution framing, and scope are already defensible. Source limitation: Elsevier updates format details, charges, and policies after this review date, so confirm administrative specifics against the journal's official pages before submission. To pressure-test the manuscript itself, run a manuscript readiness check.

• Applied Thermal Engineering submission guide
• Physics of Fluids submission guide
• For the broader cluster, see the thermal sciences journals overview.

Before you upload, run your manuscript through an International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer submission package check to catch the verification, contribution, and scope issues editors filter for on first read. The check is free to run (/ai-review) and takes a single upload.