Materials Today Communications Submission Guide: How to Submit to MTC (Elsevier)

Materials Today Communications publishes comprehensive articles, short communications, and reviews, plus manuscripts transferred in from other Materials Today family journals after peer review. The format you choose drives how much the journal expects you to show.

Comprehensive articles are the standard full-length format. There is no rigid universal page limit, so length is governed by completeness: every section should earn its space, and the characterization should be deep enough to fully support the claims. A typical full study runs in the range of a 3,500 to 8,000 word main text with the figures and tables needed to make the structure-property-performance case.

Short communications are the rapid format for a complete but compact result. A short communication is not a thinned-out full article; it is a self-contained finding that does not need the full apparatus of a comprehensive paper, typically built around 3 to 5 figures rather than the full evidence package of a comprehensive article. The most common format error is submitting a short communication that is really an under-characterized full study, which reads as incomplete rather than concise.

Reviews are welcome but should add a synthesis a reader could not assemble from the primary literature alone, not a catalog of recent papers.

For files, Elsevier accepts standard manuscript formats and provides LaTeX and Word templates. Authors should prepare highlights (three to five short bullet points capturing the core findings), a graphical abstract, a data availability statement, and a declaration of competing interest. Manuscripts that are hard to read 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, a Materials Today Communications short-communication readiness check can confirm whether a compact result genuinely holds as a short communication or whether the work needs the comprehensive-article path.

Materials Today Communications assigns submissions to a handling editor who manages them through Editorial Manager. As a rapid-publication title, the journal targets fast turnaround, and author-reported handling commonly lands in the roughly 4 to 10 week range to first decision. Treat the stages below as planning ranges, not commitments.

• Day 0: Submission and file assembly. Editorial Manager ingests your manuscript, figures, highlights, graphical abstract, declaration of competing interest, and supplementary files. You confirm the corresponding author, the definitive author list, and the data availability statement, then submit.

• Days 1 to 10: Editorial screening. The handling editor checks scope fit, format compliance, language quality, and completeness.

The fastest returns happen in this window: studies that are really chemistry or device work, manuscripts with characterization too thin for their claims, and language-quality returns rarely reach external review.

• Days 7 to 21: Reviewer assignment. The editor decides whether the sound-science bar is plausibly met and, if so, invites reviewers in the relevant materials area.

A manuscript with a broken structure-property-performance chain is commonly returned at this stage rather than sent out.

• Days 21 to 56: Peer review. Reviewers assess whether the characterization supports the claims and whether the study is reproducible. Reviews typically focus on completeness and technical correctness rather than on impact, which is the journal's distinguishing feature.

• Days 42 to 98: Decision and revision. Reject, major revision, minor revision, or accept.

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

• Months 3 to 6: Final decision and production. Once accepted, gold open access production is quick, and the article publishes online with a DOI. Total time from submission to publication is shorter than at most selective materials titles, which is the practical payoff of the sound-science model.

In our pre-submission review work with Materials Today Communications manuscripts, four patterns generate the most consistent early returns. None of them are about the science being wrong. They are about characterization depth and scope discipline that this journal screens for before peer review begins.

In our review of materials-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 handling editors at this sound-science journal read submissions. Because the journal accepts incremental work, the bar shifts entirely onto whether the study is complete and correct, which raises the stakes on every one of these.

Editors consistently screen for these before sending a manuscript out for review.

Materials Today Communications guide for authors and Elsevier author resources 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 sound-science framing, where the question is completeness rather than impact, is consistent with what we see: most attrition happens at the editorial screen, before reviewers ever weigh in, and these four patterns are why.

Incremental characterization with no materials advance. The sound-science model invites careful incremental work, and authors sometimes read that as permission to submit a study that characterizes a known material with one new processing tweak and stops there. The figures show XRD, SEM, and a property measurement, but the manuscript never states what the material actually advances: a property gained, a processing route simplified, a structure-property relationship clarified.

Materials Today Communications will accept incremental work, but incremental is not the same as inconsequential. When a manuscript reports yet another composite or yet another doping level without showing the advance, the editor reads it as a fragment of a study rather than a complete one, and it is a leading reason these papers are returned before review.

Check whether your Materials Today Communications study states a clear materials advance →

A missing link in the structure-property-performance chain. The single most common technical stall we see is a manuscript that reports synthesis and structure, then jumps to a performance claim, with the property measurement that would connect them either absent or under-reported.

The introduction promises that a structural change improves a property, the methods describe how the material was made, and the conclusion claims a performance gain, but the chain has a gap: there is no measured property data, or the property data does not actually track with the structural variable.

Reviewers in materials science treat that chain as the backbone of the result, so a paper where structure and performance are asserted to be linked but the linking property data is thin reads as incomplete regardless of how clean the synthesis looks. The methods and results sections are where this is decided.

Check if your Materials Today Communications structure-property-performance chain is complete →

Characterization too thin to support the claims made. Distinct from the missing-link problem, this is when the claims simply outrun the evidence. A manuscript asserts phase purity from a single XRD pattern, claims a mechanism from one micrograph, or reports a property from a single unrepeated measurement with no error bars.

Because Materials Today Communications screens on reproducibility, a result a reader could not reproduce from what is shown is not yet ready, no matter how plausible. A figure with no statistics, a property reported without uncertainty, and a mechanism inferred without supporting characterization all read as overclaiming to an editor who is specifically checking whether the data support the conclusions.

The fix is to match the strength of each claim to the depth of the characterization behind it.

Check whether your Materials Today Communications characterization supports its claims →

Scope framed as materials when the core contribution is elsewhere. Materials Today Communications covers all of materials science, and a recurring desk return is a manuscript whose real contribution is a synthetic-chemistry method, a device-engineering result, or a computational algorithm, with a materials section attached for fit.

The introduction frames the work as materials science, but the novel result is a reaction route, a device architecture, or a numerical method, and the material is the test vehicle rather than the advance. Handling editors at this journal identify quickly when the materials behavior is the setting rather than the subject.

A manuscript whose genuine contribution would be evaluated more naturally by a chemistry, electronics, or computational reviewer is consistently identified as a scope mismatch before review, even though the broad scope tempts authors to assume any materials-adjacent paper fits.

This guide tells you what Materials Today Communications editors look for; a Manusights review tells you whether YOUR paper passes that screen. A Manusights review checks the characterization depth, the structure-property-performance linkage, the claim-to-evidence match, and the scope framing against the sound-science 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, a Materials Today Communications characterization and scope readiness check tests whether your characterization, structure-property linkage, and scope framing clear the editorial bar this journal applies before peer review.

This guide was built from the Materials Today Communications guide for authors, Elsevier author resources, the Editorial Manager submission system, the Materials Today family transfer documentation, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from materials-science manuscripts. We checked the article types, the sound-science framing, the gold open access status, and the file requirements against the journal's own pages, and we cross-checked review-timing ranges and metrics against Scimago, Resurchify, and Clarivate JCR 2024 data.

The failure patterns describe what we see most often when materials 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 characterization depth, structure-property-performance linkage, claim-to-evidence match, and scope framing are already defensible. Source limitation: Elsevier updates fee schedules, article-type details, 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.

• Materials and Design submission guide
• Acta Materialia submission guide
• For the broader cluster, see the materials science journals overview.

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