LWT Submission Guide: How to Submit to LWT - Food Science and Technology (Elsevier)

LWT publishes research papers, review articles, short reviews, research notes, and short communications. The format you choose drives the limits that apply.

Research papers have no fixed word ceiling. Length is governed by completeness rather than a hard cap, which means an over-long paper is judged on whether every section earns its space, not on a word count.

Short communications are the format with a strict cap. A short communication is limited to 3,000 words including the abstract but excluding tables, figures, the corresponding legends, and references, and these notes receive priority for publication because they report sound, original work of limited scope in the formal organization of a full paper. A short communication that actually needs distinct Methods, Results, and Discussion sections to make its case is structurally a research paper.

For files, Elsevier accepts standard manuscript formats and provides LaTeX and Word templates. You should include a cover letter, a declaration of competing interests, an author-contributions (CRediT) statement, and a data availability statement with the submission. Figures must meet Elsevier's resolution requirements, and Elsevier encourages 3 to 5 highlights of up to 85 characters each plus a single graphical-abstract image.

Keep individual figure files within Elsevier's per-file size guidance, typically under 10 MB, and supply editable source files for line art. ORCID iDs and suggested reviewers help routing. 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 format and declarations are locked, an LWT short-communication readiness check can confirm whether a 3,000-word short communication genuinely holds the result or whether the work needs the full research-paper path.

LWT assigns submissions to a handling editor who screens for suitability before any external review. Community-reported SciRev data puts the first review round at roughly half a month to about two weeks, with around 4 reports per submission and about two review rounds before a final decision, though that is a small self-selected sample. Aggregator profiles report a much longer average peer-review time near 10 to 11 months, so treat the stages below as a wide planning range rather than commitments.

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

• Days 1 to 7: Editorial screening. Editors check scope fit, the significance statement, format compliance, language quality, and completeness.

The fastest returns happen here: animal-trial or cell-culture studies, out-of-scope chemistry or nutrition, and manuscripts with no significance statement rarely reach a reviewer.

• Days 7 to 21: Reviewer assignment. A handling editor decides whether to send the manuscript for external review or return it.

Descriptive papers with no mechanism and single-technique characterization with no functional validation are commonly returned at this stage.

• Days 21 to 90: Peer review. Suitable papers go to a minimum of two reviewers for independent assessment, typically returning around four reports across the process. The SciRev community sample suggests a fast first round, but reviewer load and subfield shift this widely.

• Weeks 8 to 20: Decision and revision. Reject, major revision, minor revision, or accept.

A revised manuscript must be accompanied by a response letter addressing each reviewer point, and most papers that pass review go through at least one major-revision round.

• After acceptance: APC and production. Because LWT is fully open access, the article publishing charge is requested after acceptance, and the paper moves to production once the charge or an applicable agreement or waiver is settled.

In our pre-submission review work with LWT - Food Science and Technology submissions, five patterns generate the most consistent early returns. None of them are about the food science being wrong. They are about scope discipline, significance framing, and evidence packaging that this journal screens for before peer review begins.

In our review of food-science 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 LWT editors read submissions. Editors consistently screen for these before sending a manuscript out for review.

LWT's Guide for Authors and Elsevier author policies define the mechanics below; the patterns describe how manuscripts coming through pre-submission review for this journal most often fall short of them. The journal's explicit scope exclusions, no animal trials and no cell cultures, plus its demand for a significance statement, are where most attrition happens at the editorial screen, before reviewers ever weigh in, and these five patterns are why.

Animal-trial or cell-culture studies submitted to a food-technology journal. LWT states plainly that papers featuring animal trials and cell cultures are outside its scope and will not be considered. The most avoidable return we see is a manuscript whose central evidence is an in-vivo feeding trial or a cell-line bioassay, framed as a food study because a food extract is involved. The food angle does not bring the work back into scope.

If the result lives or dies on the animal or cell-culture data, the manuscript belongs in a nutrition, pharmacology, or food-biotechnology venue, and submitting it to LWT costs a full cycle for a return that the scope statement already predicts.

Check whether your LWT study sits inside the journal's scope →

A descriptive effect-of-X-on-Y-food paper with no mechanism and no significance statement. The single most common stall we see is a results section that reports what changed when an ingredient, treatment, or process was applied to a food, with no explanation of why it changed and no statement of why the change matters. LWT's scope explicitly asks for innovation in approach or method and a stated significance for science or industry.

A paper that measures color, texture, or a phenolic content across a few treatment levels, reports the differences, and stops, reads as routine characterization. The introduction is where this is decided: if it does not name the novelty and the food-relevance up front, an editor reading the abstract sees a descriptive study and returns it before review.

Check if your LWT manuscript states its novelty and significance →

Single-technique characterization with no functional, sensory, or shelf-life validation. A recurring weak shape is a manuscript built on one assay, one extract, or one instrument, with no bridge from the measurement to a food outcome. The paper characterizes a compound or a property thoroughly but never connects it to function in a food matrix, to sensory acceptability, or to storage stability.

Reviewers in food science treat that bridge as part of the result, not an optional extension, so a characterization with no functional, sensory, or shelf-life evidence reads as incomplete for a technology journal. The fix is to show that the chemistry does something useful in or to a food, not only that it can be measured.

Check whether your LWT results connect chemistry to a food outcome →

Scope drift into pure analytical chemistry or pure nutrition. LWT sits between several adjacent fields, and a frequent return is a manuscript whose real contribution is an analytical method with no food-technology advance, or a nutrition or health-outcome study with food as the backdrop. The introduction frames it as food science, but the novel result is a chromatographic protocol that belongs in Food Chemistry, or a dietary-intervention finding that belongs in a nutrition journal.

Editors at LWT identify quickly when the genuine contribution would be evaluated more naturally by a pure-chemistry or pure-nutrition reviewer, and a manuscript caught in that drift is returned as a scope mismatch before review.

Food data reported without adequate statistics or replication. The last common return is sound in concept but thin in evidence: results presented from single runs, figures with no error bars, treatment comparisons with no analysis of variance or post-hoc test, and sample sizes too small to support the claims. Food measurements are variable, so reviewers expect replication, a clear statement of the experimental design, and appropriate statistical testing.

A manuscript that reports means without dispersion, or compares groups without a stated test, leaves a reviewer unable to judge whether the differences are real.

This guide tells you what LWT editors look for; a Manusights review tells you whether YOUR paper passes that screen. A Manusights review checks the scope fit, the significance statement, the functional or sensory validation, the scope framing, and the statistics 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 LWT scope and significance readiness check tests whether your novelty, food relevance, validation evidence, and statistics clear the editorial bar this journal applies before peer review.

The honest version of journal fit is a two-sided test. LWT is a strong, high-volume home for innovative food-technology work that ties chemistry to a food outcome, but it is the wrong target for several common manuscript shapes.

Submit If

• the approach or method is genuinely innovative, and the abstract states the significance for food science or the food industry without leaving it to inference
• the study is in scope: food chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, technology, or nutrition, with no animal trials and no cell cultures as the central evidence
• the work connects a measured property to a function, a sensory outcome, or shelf-life behavior in a food matrix
• the data carry replication and appropriate statistics, and you want a fully open access, high-volume Q1 venue with a fast community-reported first round

Think Twice If

• your central evidence is an animal feeding trial or a cell-line bioassay, which the journal's scope statement excludes outright
• your results report what changed in a food after a treatment but never explain the mechanism or state why it matters, so the work reads as descriptive characterization
• your manuscript is a single-technique characterization with no functional, sensory, or shelf-life validation tying the chemistry to a food outcome
• the genuine contribution is a pure analytical method or a pure nutrition finding, which would be evaluated more naturally at Food Chemistry or a dedicated nutrition journal

This guide was built from the LWT Guide for Authors on ScienceDirect, Elsevier author policies, the Editorial Manager submission system, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from food-science manuscripts. We checked the scope exclusions, the open-access transition, the short-communication word cap, 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 food-science 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 novelty, significance framing, scope fit, validation evidence, and statistics 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.

• Food Chemistry standing and editorial bar
• Best food science journals
• For the broader cluster, see the food science journals overview.

Before you upload, run your manuscript through an LWT submission package check to catch the scope, significance, and validation issues editors filter for on first read. The check is free to run (/ai-review) and takes a single upload.