Is Your Paper Ready for Blood? What ASH Editors Prioritize

Blood charges a $75 nonrefundable processing fee for Regular Articles and Brief Reports. Other article types, like letters and commentaries, don't carry this fee. It's modest compared to APCs at open-access journals, but the nonrefundable part matters psychologically. ASH isn't trying to make money off failed submissions. They're asking you to pause and consider whether this paper is really a Blood paper before you click submit.

That $75 won't sting financially. But if you're submitting a borderline paper and you know it, the fee should prompt a harder look at fit. At a 20% acceptance rate, four out of five submissions don't make it. If your paper could just as easily go to a more specialized hematology venue, it probably should.

Blood enforces strict limits by article type, and exceeding them gets your manuscript returned before anyone reads it. This isn't a soft guideline where the editors might make an exception. Papers over the limits aren't considered for review.

Before formatting your manuscript, check the exact requirements for your article type on ASH's author guidelines page. The limits cover word count, number of figures and tables, and reference counts. They differ between Regular Articles, Brief Reports, and other submission categories.

The enforcement is rigid. If the guidelines say a certain number of figures and you have one extra, don't assume the editors will overlook it. They won't. Format first, then submit. It sounds obvious, but returned manuscripts are a real time sink, especially when the fix is just trimming a supplementary figure into the supplement.

Blood isn't the only destination for hematology research. Understanding where it fits helps you target correctly.

For clinical hematology, the main competitors are The Lancet Haematology, the Journal of Clinical Oncology (for hematologic malignancies), and the New England Journal of Medicine (for practice-changing clinical trials). JCO and NEJM are broader oncology/medicine journals, so your hematology paper would need to interest readers beyond the field.

For basic hematology science, alternatives include Haematologica (published by the European Hematology Association, IF around 10), Leukemia (strong in myeloid biology and lymphoma), and the British Journal of Haematology. These journals have higher acceptance rates and faster review cycles, which matters if your finding is time-sensitive.

Blood's IF of 23.1 puts it firmly at the top of the hematology category. But impact factor alone doesn't determine where your paper belongs. A focused thrombosis study might get more readers and citations in the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis than in Blood, even though Blood's IF is higher. Readership alignment matters.

Blood's editorial decisions rest on four stated criteria: technical merits, priority, presentation, and relevance to the readership. Let's translate those from editorial-speak into what they actually mean at the desk rejection stage.

Technical merits doesn't just mean the experiments are done correctly. It means the experimental design can actually answer the question you're asking. An observational study claiming causation, an in vitro finding extrapolated to clinical significance, a mouse model with no human relevance data: these are technical problems that get caught at triage.

Priority is the hardest one to self-assess. Blood's editors are comparing your submission against everything else on their desk that week. A well-done study in a heavily published area (say, another CRISPR screen in AML) needs to show something genuinely surprising to clear the priority bar. A study in an understudied blood disease has a lower priority threshold because there's less competition.

Presentation matters more than researchers think. A confusing abstract, a results section that buries the main finding, or figures that require five minutes of squinting to interpret will hurt you. The editors are making preliminary decisions within 20 days, often faster. If your story isn't clear in the first read, you're at a disadvantage.

Relevance to readership loops back to scope. The readership is hematologists: clinical and basic science. If your paper's primary audience is oncologists, immunologists, or geneticists, it's probably not a Blood paper even if the model system involves blood cells.

These are the patterns that land papers in the 65% desk rejection pile.

The scope drift. Your paper uses a hematologic system, but the real contribution is in another field. For example, a paper studying signaling pathways in platelets where the main finding is a new insight about receptor biology. That's biochemistry, not hematology. Blood's editors spot this quickly.

The incremental advance in a crowded area. Another study adding a gene to the list of prognostic markers in AML, without showing it changes treatment decisions or reveals a new biological mechanism. Blood already has hundreds of these. Yours needs to be demonstrably different.

The format violation. Manuscripts returned for exceeding word, figure, table, or reference limits. This is entirely preventable. Check the limits. Count your elements. If you're over, cut before submitting.

The clinical study without sufficient patient numbers. Small single-center retrospective analyses rarely make it into Blood unless the disease is extremely rare. If you have 30 patients and there's a published series of 500, the editors will wonder what your 30 adds.

The basic science paper without translational context. Blood publishes plenty of basic science, but it expects some connection to human disease. A study of hematopoietic transcription factor binding in a model organism needs to explain why the finding matters for human blood disorders.

All Blood submissions go through ASH's eJournalPress online system. It's not the most modern interface, but it's functional. A few practical notes:

Upload your manuscript, figures, and supplementary materials as separate files. The system will compile them into a single PDF for reviewer access. Check the compiled PDF carefully before approving it. Garbled figures or missing sections in the compiled version happen more often than you'd expect, and the editors review what the system generates, not your original files.

Cover letters aren't optional in practice, even if the system lets you proceed without one. Use the cover letter to explain why this paper belongs in Blood specifically, not in a more specialized journal. Address scope fit directly. If the editors are going to wonder whether your paper is really hematology, answer that question before they ask it.

Blood aims to deliver a preliminary decision within 20 days. That's fast by journal standards. It means the editors are triaging aggressively. They're not agonizing over borderline papers for weeks. They're making quick calls on scope, priority, and whether external review is warranted.

This speed works in your favor if your paper is strong. You won't wait three months wondering. But it also means your paper needs to make its case immediately. If the significance isn't obvious from the abstract and first figure, 20 days is plenty of time to get a rejection.

The 20-day clock applies to the preliminary decision, which could be desk rejection, a request for revision, or a decision to send out for external peer review. If your paper goes to review, expect additional time for reviewers to respond, typically another 4-8 weeks.

Don't submit to Blood if:

• Your paper's primary audience is outside hematology, even if the experimental system involves blood cells
• You're reporting preliminary findings that need another round of experiments to be convincing
• Your clinical cohort is small and there are larger published series in the same disease
• The main contribution is methodological rather than disease-oriented
• You can't articulate in two sentences why this belongs in Blood rather than a specialized hematology journal

These aren't judgments about paper quality. A strong paper in the wrong journal is still a rejection. Blood Advances, Haematologica, Leukemia, and the British Journal of Haematology are all legitimate destinations that might be better fits depending on your study.

• Blood Author Guidelines, American Society of Hematology. https://ashpublications.org/blood/pages/author-instructions
• Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate Analytics, 2024 edition
• Blood Advances Author Information, ASH. https://ashpublications.org/bloodadvances/pages/author-instructions
• eJournalPress submission portal for Blood. https://blood.msubmit.net