Pharmaceuticals Submission Guide: How to Submit to the MDPI Medicinal Chemistry Journal

Pharmaceuticals publishes Articles, Reviews, and Communications, with Communications reserved for shorter, high-priority results. The format you choose drives the depth expected, but the characterization bar is the same across all of them.

Articles are the standard full-length format. There is no rigid word limit in the MDPI house style, so length is governed by completeness: a full medicinal-chemistry Article is expected to report synthesis, characterization, biological evaluation, and a structure-activity or mechanistic discussion. Typical Articles run several thousand words plus supporting information.

Communications are shorter and carry a higher novelty bar. A Communication that reads like a thin Article, with a single activity number and no mechanism, is the wrong format for a result that is not yet urgent or surprising enough to warrant rapid publication.

Reviews are welcome in defined medicinal-chemistry areas, but a Review that only catalogs published compounds without a synthesizing thesis on what the SAR landscape means is weaker than one that takes a position.

Two MDPI house-style limits catch authors off guard. The abstract is capped at roughly 200 words in the MDPI template and should be a single unstructured paragraph, so an abstract padded past that is trimmed at the technical check. Figures are supplied as separate high-resolution files rather than embedded, and MDPI's portal accepts individual files up to about 20 MB each, so a single oversized combined figure will fail upload. Confirm both against the current MDPI template before you submit, since the house style is updated periodically.

For every format, the supplementary information is load-bearing. Spectroscopic characterization data, NMR and mass spectra, HPLC purity traces, and biological assay protocols belong in the supporting information, and reviewers in medicinal chemistry open it first. A manuscript whose main text claims novel active compounds but whose supporting information lacks the spectra to prove identity and purity is incomplete regardless of how strong the activity looks.

Include a data availability statement, and where animal or human samples are involved, an ethics or institutional review board approval statement with the approval number.

Before the format and declarations are locked, a Pharmaceuticals characterization and SAR readiness check can confirm whether the supporting information actually proves what the main text claims.

Pharmaceuticals assigns submissions to an academic editor who handles them through the Susy system, and MDPI's published medians put the first decision near 16 days. Treat the stages below as planning ranges, not commitments, because a manuscript sent for a full single-blind review round runs longer than the median, and revisions add weeks.

• Day 0: Submission and technical check. The Susy portal ingests your files and an editorial assistant runs a technical check for completeness: declarations present, supporting information uploaded, English readable. Incomplete packages are bounced back here before an editor sees them.

• Days 1 to 4: Editorial pre-review screen. An academic editor checks scope fit (medicinal chemistry and drug discovery, not formulation or pure synthesis), characterization completeness, and whether the biological claims are supported.

The fastest desk returns happen in this window: out-of-scope work, uncharacterized compounds, and single-screening-number manuscripts rarely reach reviewers.

• Days 4 to 10: Reviewer invitation and assignment. The editor invites independent reviewers under single-blind review, typically aiming for at least two.

MDPI's fast cadence depends on reviewers accepting quickly, and medicinal-chemistry manuscripts with clean supporting information are easier to place.

• Days 10 to 16: First review reports return. Reviewers assess novelty, characterization rigor, the structure-activity relationship, and the mechanism or target evidence.

A first decision near day 16 is the MDPI median for manuscripts that move smoothly; complex pharmacology or contested SAR claims extend this.

• Weeks 3 to 8: Revision rounds. Reject, major revision, minor revision, or accept. Revised manuscripts must be accompanied by a point-by-point response to every reviewer comment.

Most medicinal-chemistry papers that pass review go through at least one major-revision round, often to add characterization data or selectivity controls reviewers asked for.

• Days post-acceptance: Production. MDPI reports median acceptance-to-publication near 3 to 4 days, so the slow part of the timeline is review and revision, not production.

In our pre-submission review work with Pharmaceuticals manuscripts, four patterns generate the most consistent early returns. None of them are about the chemistry being wrong. They are about evidence packaging and scope discipline that this medicinal-chemistry journal screens for before peer review begins.

In our review of drug-discovery 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 academic editors at Pharmaceuticals read submissions during the fast pre-review screen. Because the first decision is quick, a weak first read has less room to recover than at a slower journal.

Pharmaceuticals aims and scope and MDPI instructions for authors define the mechanics below; the patterns describe how manuscripts coming through pre-submission review for this journal most often fall short of them. The pattern is consistent: of the medicinal-chemistry manuscripts our reviewers screen, most of the ones we flag as not-yet-ready for this journal stack up on the four issues below, and they are visible before any external reviewer is invited.

Across our Pharmaceuticals pre-submission reviews, most attrition happens at the academic-editor screen, before reviewers ever weigh in, and these four patterns are why.

Bioactivity screening reported with no SAR or mechanism. The single most common stall we see is a results section that reports an IC50, an MIC, or a percentage inhibition for a set of compounds and stops there. The activity table looks complete, but a medicinal-chemistry editor reads it and asks the obvious question: what does this tell me about how to make the molecule better?

When the manuscript has no structure-activity relationship across the series, no proposed binding mode or mechanism, and no docking or target-engagement evidence, the work reads as a screening report rather than a medicinal-chemistry advance. Pharmaceuticals expects bioactivity to be the start of a story about the molecule, not the whole story. A single potent number with no SAR and no mechanism is a leading reason manuscripts are returned before external review.

Check whether your Pharmaceuticals bioactivity data carry an SAR and a mechanism →

An extract tested against a cell line with no isolated, characterized compound. A recurring return, especially on natural-product manuscripts, is an extract or a crude mixture screened against a cancer cell line or a microbial panel, with activity claimed but no isolated, purified, characterized compound behind it. Reviewers in medicinal chemistry cannot evaluate a structure-activity claim when they do not know which structure is active.

If the active species is not isolated, its structure confirmed by NMR and mass spectrometry, and its purity reported, the biological number is unanchored. The supporting information is where this is decided: a manuscript that claims novel active compounds but provides no spectra to prove identity and purity is incomplete, and an editor sees that gap on the first read.

The fix is to isolate and fully characterize the active compound before claiming activity for it.

Check if your Pharmaceuticals compounds are fully characterized before the activity claim →

Scope drift to pure synthetic chemistry or pure clinical pharmacology. Pharmaceuticals sits between chemistry and pharmacology, and the manuscripts that get redirected are the ones that fall off either edge. A pure synthesis paper that reports new compounds with no biological evaluation belongs in an organic-chemistry journal, because the medicinal-chemistry through-line is missing.

At the other edge, a pure clinical-pharmacology or pharmacokinetics study with no new chemistry, no drug-candidate design, and no structure-activity content reads as pharmacology rather than medicinal chemistry. Academic editors at this journal identify quickly when the work is really chemistry-only or pharmacology-only with a thin drug angle attached for fit.

The genuine contribution has to connect a molecule's structure to its biological behavior; when that connection is absent, the manuscript is a scope mismatch before review.

Check whether your Pharmaceuticals manuscript keeps a drug-candidate through-line →

Missing target-engagement or selectivity data behind a potency claim. The fourth pattern is a potency claim with no evidence that the compound hits what the authors say it hits, or no evidence that it hits it selectively. A manuscript reports strong activity and proposes a target, but offers no binding assay, no enzymatic inhibition against the named target, no cellular target-engagement readout, and no counter-screen against related off-targets.

Reviewers treat target engagement and selectivity as part of a drug-candidate claim, not optional extras, because a potent but promiscuous compound is not a lead. When the methods describe phenotypic activity but never test the proposed mechanism directly, and never show selectivity over a related target or a normal-cell control, the drug-candidate claim is unsupported.

The methods and supporting information are where editors confirm this, and a missing selectivity control is a common reason a strong-looking compound is sent back for more data.

This guide tells you what Pharmaceuticals editors look for; a Manusights review tells you whether YOUR paper passes that screen. A Manusights review checks the compound characterization, the structure-activity relationship, the mechanism and target-engagement evidence, and the medicinal-chemistry scope framing 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, a Pharmaceuticals scope and characterization readiness check tests whether your characterization, SAR, mechanism, and scope framing clear the editorial bar this journal applies before peer review.

This guide was built from the Pharmaceuticals aims and scope, MDPI instructions for authors, the Susy submission system, MDPI's published review-timing medians, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from medicinal-chemistry and drug-discovery manuscripts. We checked the single-blind review process, the 2,900 CHF APC, and the medicinal-chemistry scope against the journal's own pages, and we cross-checked competitor metrics against Clarivate JCR 2024, BioxBio, and Resurchify. The failure patterns describe what we see most often when drug-discovery 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 compound characterization, structure-activity relationship, mechanism evidence, and scope framing are already defensible. Source limitation: MDPI updates APCs, 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.

• Molecules submission guide
• International Journal of Molecular Sciences review time
• For the broader cluster, see the chemistry journals overview.

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