JACS 'Under Review': What Each Status Means and When to Expect a Decision

JACS assigns manuscripts to associate editors who specialize in the relevant chemistry subfield. The associate editor reads the abstract, cover letter, and scans the key figures before deciding whether to send for review.

The desk rejection rate (40 to 50%) is lower than Nature or Cell but still substantial. Papers rejected at the desk are typically either incremental (not novel enough for JACS) or better suited to a specialty ACS journal.

If your paper has passed the desk, the associate editor believes the chemistry may be significant enough for JACS. That judgment comes from someone who publishes and reviews in your specific area.

JACS sends papers to 2 to 3 expert reviewers. The review evaluates:

• scientific rigor and reproducibility
• novelty and significance of the chemistry
• adequacy of characterization (every new compound must be fully characterized)
• clarity of presentation and logical flow
• whether the claims are fully supported by the data

The review process takes 3 to 6 weeks for most papers. Communications may be reviewed slightly faster than full Articles because of their shorter length.

• Accept: rare on first round. Almost always follows revision
• Minor revision: specific, addressable changes. Strong signal of eventual acceptance
• Major revision: substantive concerns. The revised paper returns to reviewers. Address every point
• Reject: the paper does not meet JACS standards. The decision letter includes detailed reviewer feedback
• Transfer: ACS offers transfer to sister journals with reviewer context preserved

If JACS declines your paper, the associate editor may suggest transfer to a more appropriate ACS journal. Common transfer destinations:

• JACS Au: open access sister journal, still selective
• ACS Central Science: interdisciplinary, very selective
• Organic Letters, ACS Catalysis, Inorganic Chemistry: specialty journals
• ACS Omega: broad scope, less selective

Transfers preserve the manuscript context and sometimes the reviewer reports. This means the receiving journal does not start from scratch, which often leads to faster decisions than a cold submission.

• JACS Pre-Submission Checklist
• JACS Submission Process
• Is JACS a Good Journal?

For JACS, the waiting period is most valuable when it sharpens your revision posture. Reviewers often focus less on stylistic issues and more on whether the chemistry package can survive a serious challenge on significance, reproducibility, and full support for the main claim.

That work makes a fast decision more actionable and usually improves the next journal move even if the first answer is no.

It also reduces the chance that a promising revision window gets consumed by basic file-hunting instead of scientific argument.

How this page was created: sources used include JACS information for authors, ACS manuscript submission guidance, JACS journal pages, SciRev author-reported timing, and Manusights internal analysis of manuscripts prepared for JACS and adjacent ACS journals. We did not test a private live ACS Paragon Plus submission account for this page; status guidance is based on public ACS materials, documented author experience, and patterns from pre-submission review work.

In our analysis of JACS-targeted submissions, the named failure pattern after a paper reaches under review is not administrative delay. It is reviewer pressure on whether the chemistry claim is fully supported by characterization, scope, mechanistic evidence, and comparison to the closest recent ACS papers.

What JACS does well: expert associate-editor triage, specialist reviewers, and ACS transfer paths when the paper is strong but mismatched.

Where the process falls short for authors: status labels do not tell you which reviewer concern is building, and a long wait can still end in a transfer recommendation rather than a revision.

Use this page if your manuscript is already under review. Use the JACS submission process guide if you are preparing the upload, and the JACS journal overview if you are still deciding whether to submit.

In our pre-submission review work with manuscripts targeting JACS, three failure patterns generate the most consistent desk rejections and major revision requests. We find these across manuscripts we've reviewed through our JACS submission readiness check.

The substrate scope limited to favorable examples. JACS reviewers expect a reaction scope that includes diverse substrate types and honestly reports the boundaries of the method: which substrates fail, and why. We observe that papers presenting 10 to 15 scope examples selected from successful outcomes, without any failed examples or a discussion of limitations, generate reviewer requests for scope clarification in roughly half of cases we review. Papers that include a scope table with honest failure mode discussion clear this standard; papers that present only the best results face suspicion about generalizability.

The mechanism proposed without experimental support. JACS editors evaluate whether mechanistic claims are supported by kinetic data, isotopic labeling, spectroscopic intermediates, or computational studies. We observe that papers proposing a catalytic cycle or mechanistic pathway based on chemical intuition, without experimental data distinguishing between competing mechanisms, generate reviewer requests for mechanistic evidence as a primary concern. SciRev community data for JACS consistently identifies "proposed mechanism unsupported by experiment" as a major revision request category. Including at least one piece of mechanistic evidence (Hammett plot, kinetic isotope effect, or computed transition state) at initial submission substantially reduces this risk.

The benchmark that excludes the most recently published competing method. JACS is a fast-moving journal and reviewers are actively publishing in the same area. We find that papers comparing favorably to methods reported 2 or more years ago, without including comparisons to more recent literature, generate reviewer requests for updated comparisons in the majority of cases. A systematic search of the past 18 months of JACS, Organic Letters, and Angewandte Chemie before finalizing comparison tables is the most reliable prevention.