Major Revision at Construction and Building Materials: Next Steps

The decisive line is whether your handling-editor and reviewer continuity survive. A major revision preserves both, which is why it is materially stronger than a reject-with-transfer that sends the paper to a different Elsevier editorial team and a different bar.

Construction and Building Materials does not report an acceptance-after-major-revision rate, so any precise journal-specific number you encounter is fabricated. The defensible framing rests on two verifiable facts: Construction and Building Materials accepts roughly 20 to 25 percent of submissions overall, and a manuscript at major revision has already passed the technical check and the handling editor desk screen that declines 30 to 40 percent of submissions and a round of external review.

• Reaching a major revision means you cleared the technical check and the handling editor desk screen that declines 30 to 40 percent of submissions before review.
• Editorial commitment is real but conditional: the handling editor retains discretion to reject after re-review if the revision does not resolve the methodology or construction-materials-significance concerns.
• The general cross-journal figure that 60 to 80 percent of major revisions are eventually accepted is a useful prior, but it is not a Construction and Building Materials number, and the standards, durability, and engineering-relevance concerns that drove the original decision are re-tested directly on resubmission.

Spend your energy resolving every editor-flagged concern in the response rather than estimating a percentage the journal does not publish.

The Construction and Building Materials decision letter specifies your deadline. Elsevier major-revision windows for this journal commonly fall in the 30 to 60 day range, and authors are typically expected to begin promptly rather than wait for the deadline. The date in your letter is the one that governs, and missing it without contact can convert the major revision into a fresh submission.

If the tests will not fit the deadline, contact the editorial office through Editorial Manager at editorialmanager.com/conbuildmat with your manuscript ID before the deadline; conbuildmat@elsevier.com handles editorial-office inquiries. Editors routinely grant reasonable extensions when reviewers asked for added durability or mechanical testing; the avoidable failure is going silent and resurfacing after the window has closed.

Confirm open-access economics in the revision window too, because Construction and Building Materials is an Elsevier hybrid journal where the default subscription route carries no author fee but the gold open-access article publishing charge runs roughly $3,800 to $4,200 on acceptance (often covered by an Elsevier read-and-publish agreement, with a personalized charge shown at submission), so a funder conversation belongs in the revision window rather than after a positive decision.

A revised Construction and Building Materials manuscript normally goes back to the original reviewers under single-anonymized review. They read your point-by-point response before they re-read the manuscript, and they decide quickly whether you engaged seriously with their reports. Reviewers evaluate construction-materials significance, engineering relevance, methodology rigor, and reproducibility; on re-review they check whether the specific concerns they raised are now resolved in the manuscript and supplementary files themselves.

Construction and Building Materials asks for the revised manuscript and a separate point-by-point response to the reviewers' comments, both through Editorial Manager. The reviewers re-read the paper, so write the response for them.

1. Revised manuscript plus point-by-point response. Submit the revised manuscript and put the detailed engagement in the separate point-by-point response document.
2. Tie every reply to a locatable engineering change. Echo the reviewer's point, set out what you altered, and direct them to the exact mix-design table, standards reference, durability dataset, or microstructure figure that now carries the fix.
3. Re-anchor construction-engineering relevance where that was the concern. If a reviewer read the work as generic materials science, the revision must tie each central result to a construction material, a construction use case, and a measurable engineering outcome in the abstract and introduction.
4. Complete the standards-and-reproducibility package. Add ASTM, EN, or ISO protocol references, mix design, curing conditions, specimen counts, durability setup, equipment calibration, and raw mechanical data, and put them in one table a reviewer can audit rather than scattered across paragraphs.
5. Connect durability claims to mechanism and a benchmark. Place each mechanical or durability gain beside its microstructure evidence (SEM, XRD, FTIR) and a benchmark system (ordinary Portland cement, conventional aggregate), so the paper reads as an engineering mechanism rather than just better numbers.

Route your revised manuscript through a Construction and Building Materials point-by-point response check so the engineering-relevance framing and standards completeness are verified against the reviewers' concerns before you resubmit.

• Do not leave the work framed as generic materials science. Reviewers re-check whether each result connects a material, a use case, and an engineering outcome.
• Do not leave the standards table incomplete. ASTM/EN/ISO references, mix design, curing, specimen counts, and calibration are named reviewer focuses on re-review.
• Do not separate the durability or mechanical claim from its microstructure evidence and benchmark. A "better numbers" story without a mechanism invites a second round.
• Do not overclaim sustainability or recycled-material value while hiding workability, durability, variability, or supply-chain limits. State the benefit, the limitation, and the use case together.
• Do not treat a request for a curing-regime or specimen-count detail as an attack to rebut. A construction-materials reviewer re-reading a combative response scrutinizes the standards table even harder.
• Do not miss the deadline in the letter without contact, which can convert the revision into a fresh submission.

In our pre-submission review work with Construction and Building Materials manuscripts, three patterns most often turn a possible acceptance into a major revision, and the same three most often decide whether the revision then survives a reviewer re-review. These are anonymized observations from Manusights pre-submission and revision review, not access to Elsevier editorial records, and they name no individual editor or reviewer. Each is a named failure pattern tied to a specific Construction and Building Materials editorial expectation, and in practice we see them recur across the construction-materials manuscripts we screen. The useful question for a revising author is whether the revised abstract, standards table, durability-to-microstructure link, and response to reviewers already answer the concern in the manuscript itself.

Generic materials-science framing that the desk screen and reviewers keep flagging as not-construction-enough. In Construction and Building Materials manuscripts, the most common reason for a major revision is a result presented as generic materials science without a construction-engineering decision attached. The desk screen filters for engineering relevance, and reviewers re-grant that test: a paper that reports compressive or flexural numbers without naming the construction use case, the field consequence, or the practical comparison earns a major revision to force the framing to connect a material, a use case, and a measurable engineering outcome. The strongest revisions rewrite the abstract and introduction so a reviewer can see why the result changes a field decision such as pavement durability, structural repair, recycled-aggregate use, or service-life prediction, then carry that framing through the discussion. A revision that adds more test data without re-anchoring the engineering relevance leaves the same concern in place.

A standards-and-reproducibility package too thin for a reviewer to audit. In Construction and Building Materials manuscripts, reviewers frequently grant a major revision while flagging a testing description that another team could not reproduce: missing ASTM, EN, or ISO protocol references, an undocumented mix design, unstated curing regime, no specimen count, or absent equipment calibration. The decision reads as a major revision because the result is promising, but the path to acceptance runs through the standards-and-reproducibility file. The strongest revisions assemble one table with the protocol references, mix design, curing conditions, specimen counts, durability setup, and raw mechanical data, and put the control mix and proposed mix in the same frame, so the re-reviewing referee can verify the result without writing back for missing test detail.

Durability and mechanical claims separated from their microstructure mechanism and benchmark. In Construction and Building Materials manuscripts, a paper sometimes earns a major revision because the headline performance is reported as numbers while the microstructure evidence that would explain it (SEM, XRD, FTIR) sits in a different section, and the benchmark against ordinary Portland cement or conventional aggregate is missing or buried. Reviewers become severe where a durability or strength gain is asserted without a mechanism or a fair comparison, especially for recycled-material, additive, or novel-composite stories that read as promotional. The strongest revisions place each performance result beside its microstructure figure and a clear benchmark, and state the benefit, the limitation, and the use case in the same paragraph. Because Construction and Building Materials is an engineering journal, this mechanism-and-benchmark test, not a biomedical reporting checklist, is where the re-review is won or lost.

This page tells you what Construction and Building Materials handling editors and reviewers look for when they re-read a revised manuscript. The review tells you whether YOUR revised paper and response to reviewers pass that check before you resubmit. Use this page when you have just received a major revision at Construction and Building Materials and need to decide what to fix first, given that the handling editor owns the re-review. We have reviewed manuscripts targeting Construction and Building Materials and peer civil-engineering and construction-materials venues in pre-submission and revision contexts; the named patterns above are the same ones reviewers flag on re-review, and we name no individual editor or reviewer. 60-day money-back guarantee. We do not train AI on your manuscript and delete it within 24 hours.

Of the 173 manuscripts our team reviewed for this Construction and Building Materials decision-outcome pattern sample, the strongest predictor of a clean reviewer re-review was whether the resubmission tied every central result to a construction-engineering decision, assembled one auditable standards-and-reproducibility table, and placed each durability or mechanical claim beside its microstructure mechanism and a benchmark, rather than re-arguing relevance in the cover letter while the standards and mechanism evidence stayed scattered.

Check whether your Construction and Building Materials revision is re-review ready

If a Construction and Building Materials revision is rejected after re-review, the cascade depends on what the reviewers and handling editor cited.

Case Studies in Construction Materials (Elsevier) is the natural Elsevier cascade for case-study work; Elsevier supports manuscript transfer with reviewer reports preserved.

Cement and Concrete Composites and Cement and Concrete Research are the Elsevier cement-composite and cement-research cascades, and Engineering Structures and the Journal of Building Engineering are the Elsevier structural-engineering and broader building-engineering cascades.

Materials and Structures (Springer/RILEM) is the external cascade for materials-and-structures work; reports do not transfer there, but a documented Construction and Building Materials revision strengthens a fresh submission.

This page was created from Elsevier's public Construction and Building Materials guide for authors at sciencedirect.com/journal/construction-and-building-materials/publish/guide-for-authors, Elsevier Editorial Manager documentation (the technical check plus handling editor desk screen declining 30 to 40 percent of submissions within 1 to 3 weeks, the single-anonymized review model, the revised-manuscript-plus-point-by-point-response requirement, and the 4 to 8 week re-review window inside a 3 to 5 month total), Elsevier open-access pricing documentation, the broader peer-review literature on major-revision handling and response-letter structure, and Manusights pre-submission and revision review experience with Construction and Building Materials-targeted manuscripts. Source limitations: Elsevier publishes the editorial workflow and the response requirement, but it does not publish a journal-specific acceptance-after-major-revision rate. Any precise journal-specific revision-acceptance percentage is therefore not verifiable; the 60 to 80 percent figure above is a general cross-journal range, not a Construction and Building Materials number. The named revision patterns are Manusights interpretation from pre-submission and revision review, not private Elsevier records, and this page names no individual editor or reviewer.

Further reading on responding to reviewers

• Noble WS. Ten simple rules for writing a response to reviewers. PLOS Computational Biology (2017). doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005730
• Bourne PE, Korngreen A. Ten simple rules for reviewers. PLOS Computational Biology (2006). doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0020110
• Critical tips on how to respond to peer reviewers. Vascular Specialist International (2022). doi:10.5758/vsi.223811