Is Your Paper Ready for Sensors? MDPI's Cross-Disciplinary Sensing Journal

The scope statement says "all aspects of the science and technology of sensors and biosensors," which is about as broad as a journal scope can get. In practice, here's what fills the pages:

• Chemical sensors and biosensors, electrochemical, optical, piezoelectric, and immunosensor platforms
• Physical sensors, temperature, pressure, strain, acceleration, displacement, and magnetic field sensors
• Gas sensors, metal oxide, conducting polymer, and optical gas sensing
• MEMS and NEMS, microfabricated sensor devices and their integration
• Remote sensing, satellite imagery, LiDAR, SAR, and earth observation applications
• IoT and networked sensing, wireless sensor networks, edge computing for sensor data, smart buildings
• Wearable sensors, health monitoring, motion tracking, textile-integrated sensing
• Signal processing, algorithms, machine learning on sensor data, data fusion

That list isn't exhaustive. I've seen papers on acoustic emission monitoring of concrete structures, SERS-based detection of pesticides, and deep learning for radar target recognition all published within the same month. The editorial team doesn't draw hard boundaries between these communities, which is both Sensors' strength and its weakness.

You can't evaluate Sensors without talking about MDPI. The publisher has grown from a small open-access outfit to one of the world's largest journal publishers by volume. That growth has generated real controversy, and you should be aware of it.

MDPI journals operate on a model that prioritizes speed and volume. The editorial process is heavily systematized. Reviewers are given tight deadlines (often 10 days for a first review). Editors are typically academic guest editors, not full-time professionals. Papers move through the pipeline faster than at almost any other publisher.

This model has clear advantages. You won't wait six months for a decision. The online-first publication is genuinely fast. And the open-access format means your paper is immediately available worldwide.

But there are trade-offs. Some researchers view MDPI journals with skepticism. You'll find heated debates on academic Twitter and PubPreview about whether MDPI's model prioritizes quantity over quality. Some institutions don't count MDPI publications for tenure or promotion. Others treat them the same as any indexed journal.

Here's my honest take: Sensors isn't a predatory journal. It's indexed in Web of Science and Scopus, it has a legitimate impact factor, and plenty of good applied research appears there. But it also publishes some papers that wouldn't survive review at more selective venues. Your paper will be judged on its own merits, not on where it appeared, but you should know that not everyone in every department views MDPI journals the same way.

This is something many first-time Sensors authors don't realize. A large fraction of papers in Sensors, I'd estimate well over half, are published through special issues rather than as regular submissions. MDPI actively solicits guest editors to organize themed collections, and those guest editors then invite researchers to submit.

What does this mean for you?

If you've received an invitation to submit to a Sensors special issue, that's not the same as the unsolicited "submit your paper" emails that MDPI also sends. Special issue invitations usually come from a guest editor who knows your work. The review process for special issue papers is the same as for regular submissions, but the acceptance rate tends to be slightly higher because the pool of authors is more targeted.

If you're submitting a regular manuscript (not to a special issue), your paper goes through the standard editorial office. It'll be assigned to an academic editor and sent to reviewers. The process works, but you should know that regular submissions are a smaller share of the journal's overall output than you might expect.

One thing to watch out for: guest editors vary enormously in how carefully they manage their special issues. Some run a tight ship with demanding reviewers. Others are more permissive. You can't control this, but you can look at the guest editor's own publication record and the quality of papers already published in that special issue to get a sense of what you're working with.

Let's be direct about this. Sensors is a good fit in these situations:

Your work is applied and cross-disciplinary. You've built a wearable sensor system for monitoring gait in Parkinson's patients. The engineering is solid, the validation is real, but the novelty isn't in the sensing mechanism, it's in the application. The engineering journals won't find it exciting enough because the transducer isn't new. The clinical journals won't publish it because it's a prototype, not a clinical trial. Sensors will take this paper seriously.

You need fast turnaround. Your PhD student is defending in three months and needs a published paper. Your grant report is due and you need a peer-reviewed publication to list. Sensors' 2-4 week review and 6-10 week total publication time is genuinely hard to beat.

You want open access without the hassle. Sensors is fully OA under CC BY 4.0. If your funder requires open access and you don't want to deal with the hybrid OA process at Elsevier or Springer, Sensors is straightforward.

Your paper is solid but not field-changing. I know that sounds harsh, but it's worth saying plainly. Not every paper changes its field. A well-executed study that applies known sensing techniques to a new analyte, a new environment, or a new population has real value. Sensors publishes this kind of work regularly, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Your paper has genuine novelty in the sensing mechanism. If you've developed a new transduction principle, a new material platform, or a detection method that's an order of magnitude better than existing approaches, you're leaving citations and prestige on the table by publishing in Sensors. Try Sensors and Actuators B, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, ACS Sensors, or Analytical Chemistry first.

Your institution treats MDPI publications differently. Some tenure committees, especially in Europe and parts of Asia, have started questioning MDPI journals during evaluations. If you're going up for tenure soon, ask a senior colleague in your department how Sensors is perceived before committing.

Your paper is primarily a machine learning study. Sensors gets a lot of submissions where the "sensor" part is an existing dataset and the actual contribution is a classification algorithm. The journal publishes these, but they often don't get cited because the ML community reads other venues and the sensing community doesn't find the ML contribution novel. If your paper is really about the algorithm, consider IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement or Pattern Recognition.

Even with a 40-45% acceptance rate, plenty of papers get rejected. Here's what I've seen go wrong:

Review papers that aren't systematic. Sensors publishes reviews, but reviewers expect either a systematic review with explicit inclusion/exclusion criteria or a critical review that synthesizes the field in a genuinely new way. "Here are 150 papers about gas sensors, organized by sensing material" isn't enough. You need a thesis.

Application papers with no validation. You've attached a sensor to something and collected data. Great. But if you haven't validated the measurements against a reference method, or if your sample size is five, reviewers will push back. Even in a high-volume journal, "we measured something" isn't a paper.

Papers that don't fit any section. Sensors is divided into sections (Chemical Sensors, Biosensors, Physical Sensors, Remote Sensing, etc.). If your paper doesn't clearly fit into any section, the editorial office may struggle to find appropriate reviewers. Make it easy for them: state explicitly in your cover letter which section best fits your work.

Resubmissions from higher-tier rejections without revision. Editors can tell when a paper has been rejected elsewhere and submitted to Sensors without changes. If Sensors and Actuators B or ACS Sensors rejected your paper and you're resubmitting to Sensors, address the previous reviewers' concerns first. The reviewer pool overlaps more than you'd think.

Pick the right section. When you submit, you'll choose a section. This determines which editors and reviewers see your paper. If your biosensor paper goes to the Physical Sensors section by mistake, you'll get reviewers who don't understand your work. Take two minutes to look at the section descriptions and choose carefully.

Format for MDPI standards. MDPI has its own LaTeX and Word templates. They're strict about formatting, and papers that don't follow the template get sent back for reformatting before review even starts. Download the template from the MDPI website and use it from the beginning.

Consider suggesting reviewers. Sensors handles thousands of papers, and the editorial office sometimes struggles to find reviewers quickly. Suggesting 3-4 qualified reviewers (who aren't your collaborators) can speed up the process.

Budget for the APC. At ~$2,600, the APC isn't trivial. Check whether your institution has an MDPI agreement that provides a discount. Some universities have institutional memberships that reduce the fee. Don't submit and then discover you can't pay.