Pharmaceutics Submission Guide: MDPI Process (2026)

Pharmaceutics is not a stronger version of a subscription drug-delivery journal, and it is not a weaker one. It is a different model. MDPI built it around speed and soundness-based review: the editorial question is whether the work is methodologically sound, completely characterized, and within scope, not whether it ranks among the most translationally ambitious findings of the year. That model shapes everything about how you should prepare the package.

Two consequences matter most. First, the journal is section-based, organized by pharmaceutical subfield, so scope fit is assessed against a specific section rather than a vague "is this interesting" bar. The sections that carry most submissions are Drug Delivery and Controlled Release, Physical Pharmacy and Formulation, Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics, Biopharmaceutics, and Nanomedicine and Nanotechnology. Second, the pre-check is fast and partly template-driven, so completeness is rewarded and incompleteness is punished early.

A technically interesting nanoparticle with no release profile can be returned before a reviewer ever sees it, while a competent, complete, in-scope formulation study moves quickly.

The editorial bar here is different from the top of the field. A reviewer at Pharmaceutics is asking whether your formulation is real, reproducible, and characterized, and whether it does something pharmaceutically meaningful. A reviewer at Journal of Controlled Release is asking whether the delivery mechanism is novel and whether the in vivo evidence carries a translational claim. Those are different questions, and they change what "ready" means.

The core fit for most submissions is the original research article. It works best when a real or model drug is central, the formulation is characterized end to end, the release and stability behavior are quantified, and the declarations and reporting package are complete on first upload.

Ask these questions before you submit:

• is a drug, or a defensible model drug, actually central to the study, or is the drug a token loaded into a system whose real story is the material?
• have you measured release, loading, and stability, or are any of those still described as "ongoing"?
• does the work answer a pharmaceutical question, such as bioavailability, targeting, dose reduction, or stability, rather than only a characterization question?
• are the ethics, consent, and data statements complete and specific, or are they still stub text?

If the answers are uncertain, the pre-check problem is usually more important than the science problem.

The pre-check editor is answering a short list of questions fast.

On scope, the editor asks whether the manuscript belongs in a pharmaceutics journal and in which section. If the drug-delivery or formulation relevance is thin or bolted on, the paper is redirected or returned. The editor has seen the "we loaded a model drug into our new material" framing thousands of times, and it reads instantly as a materials paper wearing a pharmaceutics jacket.

On soundness, the question is whether the methods are reproducible and the characterization complete. Pharmaceutics does not require the finding to be field-defining, but it does require the formulation to be done correctly and reported in full.

On integrity, the editor checks whether animal-ethics approvals, human-subjects consent, image-integrity expectations, and data availability are all in order. MDPI runs integrity and plagiarism checks at pre-check, and gaps here trigger fast returns. On completeness, the editor looks for the declarations block. A manuscript missing Author Contributions, Funding, or Conflicts of Interest reads as not ready, even when the science is fine.

Manuscript structure: Pharmaceutics expects a defined section set: Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, plus the declarations block. Original research articles need a structured or unstructured abstract of around 200 words, and 3 to 8 keywords. The abstract is the first thing the pre-check editor reads, so the drug, the delivery or formulation strategy, and the main quantitative result all need to be visible there.

"A novel nanoparticle system was developed and characterized" is not a result; "encapsulation efficiency reached 88 percent and sustained release extended to 72 hours, doubling oral bioavailability in rats" is.

Characterization and methods readiness: Provide full experimental detail so the formulation can be reproduced, and report the standard characterization set for your system: particle or droplet size and distribution, zeta potential where relevant, drug loading and encapsulation efficiency, an in vitro release profile with the release model named, and physical and chemical stability over a stated period. For animal pharmacokinetic work, report the model, dosing, sampling schedule, and the pharmacokinetic parameters with their analysis method.

A delivery paper that reports synthesis and morphology but no release curve is the single most common reviewer-stage friction point.

Declarations and ethics: Draft the Institutional Animal Care statement, the Institutional Review Board and Informed Consent statements where human subjects are involved, Author Contributions (by initials), Funding, Data Availability, and Conflicts of Interest sections before you upload. These are not post-acceptance paperwork at MDPI; they are pre-check gates. Animal pharmacokinetic and toxicity studies without an ethics-approval identifier are returned fast.

Figures, supplementary, and abstract assets: A graphical abstract is optional but commonly used; if supplied, it should be a high-resolution PNG, JPEG, or TIFF at a minimum of 560 by 1100 pixels. Figures should be supplied at a minimum of 1000 dpi for line art. The SuSy portal accepts individual upload files up to roughly 50 MB, so split large characterization datasets into separate supplementary files.

There is no fixed cap on the number of figures, but a research article with more than 8 main figures and a wall of supplementary spectra usually signals that the main pharmaceutical story is not yet focused. ORCID is expected for the submitting author, and the system asks for suggested reviewers.

In our pre-submission review work with Pharmaceutics manuscripts, three failure patterns generate the most consistent pre-check returns and reviewer friction, and they are testable against your own manuscript before you upload.

Across our drug-delivery and formulation pre-submission reviews, the pattern that surprises authors most is that the Pharmaceutics pre-check is not a quality filter in the Journal of Controlled Release sense; it is a scope, completeness, and pharmaceutical-purpose filter. The manuscripts that get returned fastest are rarely bad science. They are competent studies whose drug-delivery angle, characterization set, or release data is not ready for a fast, section-based screen. Manuscripts coming through pre-submission review for Pharmaceutics split cleanly along these three lines.

Materials-first or pharmacology-first work that the section editor cannot place

The single most common pattern we see is a manuscript whose pharmaceutics relevance is downstream rather than central. The study is really a polymer-chemistry, nanomaterials, or pure-pharmacology paper, and a model drug has been loaded into the system, or a marketed drug has been mentioned, so the work can target a pharmaceutics journal.

Pharmaceutics is section-based, so the pre-check editor has to place the manuscript in a section like Drug Delivery and Controlled Release or Physical Pharmacy and Formulation. When the real subject is the synthesis route or the receptor pharmacology rather than the delivery or formulation behavior, the section assignment fails and the paper is returned or redirected fast, often toward Pharmaceuticals, Polymers, or a materials title.

The testable version: read your own abstract and introduction, and ask whether a section editor could name the pharmaceutics subfield from the first paragraph alone, and whether the drug is doing pharmaceutical work or just decorating a materials study. If the delivery angle only appears in the discussion, or the drug is interchangeable with any other cargo, the framing is too thin for the pre-check.

Check whether your Pharmaceutics scope angle reads as drug delivery from the abstract

The "yet another nanoparticle carrier" study with no comparator and no relevance

The second pattern is the formulation paper that characterizes a carrier thoroughly but never establishes why it matters. We repeatedly see well-executed nanoparticle, liposome, micelle, or hydrogel studies that report size, zeta potential, loading, and a release curve, and then stop, with no comparison against a conventional formulation or free drug, no pharmacokinetic or efficacy readout, and no statement of the pharmaceutical problem being solved.

Reviewers at Pharmaceutics will accept incremental work, but they push back hard on a carrier that is "novel" only in the sense that no one had combined those exact excipients before. The testable version: for the central claim of your paper, identify the comparator.

If you claim sustained release, show it against immediate release; if you claim improved bioavailability, show the pharmacokinetic curve against the free drug or the marketed product; if you claim targeting, show biodistribution against a non-targeted control. A carrier described in isolation, with release and stability data but no comparator and no in vivo or pharmacokinetic relevance, is the most common reviewer-stage rejection in this family, and the highest-leverage fix before submission.

Check whether your Pharmaceutics formulation has a comparator and a pharmaceutical claim

Missing release, stability, or pharmacokinetic data the methods promised

The third pattern shows up when the package is internally incomplete: the methods describe a release assay or a stability study or an animal pharmacokinetic experiment, but the corresponding data, model fit, or parameter table is missing, partial, or buried as a single unlabeled supplementary figure.

A controlled-release manuscript with no release profile, a stability claim with no time-course data, or a pharmacokinetic study that reports a concentration-time plot but no parameters (no area under the curve, no half-life, no maximum concentration) forces reviewers to spend their attention on missing structure rather than on the science. In drug delivery, where the entire point is how the drug behaves over time, this is fatal at review.

The testable version: list every kinetic, release, or stability claim your abstract and discussion make, and confirm each one has a quantified result, a named model or method, and a statistical treatment in the manuscript itself. If a release or stability or pharmacokinetic claim points only to "see supplementary" without the supplementary actually carrying the curve and the parameters, the data package is not ready.

Check whether your Pharmaceutics release and pharmacokinetic data are complete

Each of these is something you can check against your own draft before you commit the submission. This guide tells you what Pharmaceutics editors look for; the review tells you whether YOUR paper passes the pre-check before you upload. We have reviewed manuscripts targeting drug-delivery and formulation journals, including Pharmaceutics and its open-access and subscription peers. Paid Manusights reviews include a 60-day money-back guarantee, and we do not train models on submitted manuscripts.

Run a Pharmaceutics submission package check to see whether your scope framing, characterization set, and release data will clear the MDPI pre-check.

Pharmaceutics reports a median first decision near 15 to 16 days and median acceptance-to-publication around 3 to 4 days. Treat these as planning ranges, not promises: formulation studies needing specialist reviewers and clinical-pharmacokinetics manuscripts often run longer because reviewer search takes time in narrow subfields.

• Day 0: Submission via SuSy. The portal accepts the package and routes it to the section editor for pre-check.

• Days 1 to 3: Editorial pre-check. The editor screens scope and section fit, characterization completeness, ethics, integrity and plagiarism checks, and basic soundness.

The fastest returns happen here, before any reviewer is invited.

• Days 3 to 7: Reviewer invitation. Manuscripts that pass pre-check enter single-blind reviewer search, typically targeting two or more reviewers in the relevant pharmaceutics subfield.

• Days 7 to 16: Peer review and first decision. Reviewer reports return and the editor issues the first decision, with a median near 15 to 16 days from submission.

Major revision is the most common outcome for papers that clear pre-check.

• Days 16 to 35: Revision and acceptance. Revisions are usually requested on a short clock; resubmission and a second review cycle commonly land acceptance inside a few weeks for in-scope, complete packages.

• Days 35 to 40: Production and publication. Acceptance to publication runs around 3 to 4 days at median, so the slow part of the calendar is reviewer search and revision, not production.

This guide was researched and built from primary sources: the sources we checked include the Pharmaceutics Instructions for Authors, the journal's aims-and-scope, sections, and editorial-process pages, MDPI's research and publication ethics policy, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from drug-delivery and formulation manuscripts deciding between Pharmaceutics and peer drug-delivery journals. We reviewed and compared current MDPI author guidance with recent Manusights work reviews from authors weighing Pharmaceutics, Journal of Controlled Release, International Journal of Pharmaceutics, European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics, and Molecular Pharmaceutics. Last reviewed by the Manusights pharmaceutical-sciences editorial team on 2026-06-07.

Source limitations: MDPI can update the APC, article-format details, abstract caps, section list, and editorial-process numbers after this review date, so verify final administrative details against the official Pharmaceutics author pages before upload. Median timelines are reported by the journal and vary by subfield. Use this guide for the decision the official instructions cannot answer: whether your scope framing, characterization set, and release data are ready for the MDPI pre-check.

• Journal of Controlled Release submission guide
• Is Journal of Controlled Release a good journal?
• Cancers submission guide
• Best pharmacology journals
• Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B submission guide

Before you upload, run your manuscript through a Pharmaceutics submission readiness check to catch the scope, characterization, and release-data gaps the MDPI pre-check filters for. The check is free to run (/ai-review) and takes a single upload.