Polymers Submission Guide: How to Submit to Polymers (MDPI)

Polymers publishes Articles, Reviews, Communications, and Perspectives, plus several shorter formats. The journal places no fixed maximum length on manuscripts, provided the text is concise and comprehensive, so length is governed by completeness rather than a hard cap. That freedom is a trap for under-disciplined writing: an over-long Article is judged on whether every section earns its space.

Articles are the core format, full original research with the standard structure MDPI enforces through its template: Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, and the declarations block.

Communications are short reports of preliminary but significant results or a piece of a larger multi-year study, including new methods, experiments, or materials. A Communication is not a way to publish thin work fast; it is a format for a complete short result.

Reviews are comprehensive syntheses, and Perspectives are typically invited articles that assess current developments and future directions in a subfield.

A few hard limits apply even though the manuscript length is open: the abstract is capped at 200 words and is strictly enforced, figures must be at least 1000 pixels wide or 300 dpi, and the total upload across manuscript, figures, and supplementary files must not exceed 120 MB. For files, MDPI requires the Word or LaTeX template, figures at adequate resolution, and a data availability statement.

Polymers asks authors to publish all experimental controls and make full datasets available where possible, and to disclose at submission any restriction on the availability of materials or data. The APC includes only minor English editing by native speakers, so the language bar is the author's responsibility before upload, not something the journal fixes after acceptance. All submissions are screened with iThenticate for similarity.

Before the format and declarations are locked, a Polymers characterization and scope readiness check can confirm whether the material is characterized to the depth a polymer reviewer expects and whether the contribution is genuinely polymer-centered.

Polymers routes every submission through a two-stage pre-check before peer review, and the journal's median first decision near 14 days means each stage moves fast. Treat the stages below as planning ranges, not commitments.

• Day 0: Submission and technical pre-check. You upload through SuSy and the Managing Editor performs a technical pre-check: template compliance, figure quality, English readability, completeness of the declarations block, and an iThenticate similarity screen. A manuscript missing a data availability statement or built outside the template can be returned here within a day.

• Days 1 to 3: Editorial pre-check. An Academic Editor performs the editorial pre-check, judging scope fit and basic soundness.

This is where scope mismatches and under-characterized materials are filtered out before reviewers are invited. Most fast rejections at Polymers happen in this window.

• Days 3 to 10: Reviewer invitation and review. Once past pre-check, the manuscript goes to single-blind external reviewers, typically two or more.

Because MDPI sets short reviewer deadlines, reports return on a compressed cadence relative to subscription polymer journals.- Days 10 to 14: First decision. The Academic Editor issues a first decision, reject, major revision, minor revision, or accept, near the journal's ~14-day median. A revision must be returned with a point-by-point response addressing every reviewer comment.

• Weeks 2 to 6: Revision rounds. Most accepted papers go through at least one revision round.

MDPI's fast model holds on the revision side too, with short author and reviewer turnarounds.

• Days after acceptance: Production. Median acceptance-to-publication is near 2.6 days, so once a paper is accepted it appears online almost immediately, which is part of why authors choose the venue.

In our pre-submission review work with Polymers manuscripts, four patterns generate the most consistent early returns. None of them are about the chemistry being uninteresting. They are about characterization completeness, scope discipline, and a stated novelty case, the things this journal screens for at the editorial pre-check before peer review begins.

In our review of polymer-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 Academic Editors at Polymers read submissions. The journal's speed raises the stakes on every one, because a fast pre-check leaves no slow path on which a thin section quietly gets fixed. Editors consistently screen for these before sending a manuscript out for review.

Polymers Instructions for Authors and the MDPI ethics policy define the mechanics below; the patterns describe how manuscripts coming through pre-submission review for this journal most often fall short of them. SciRev-style community data on MDPI titles, where authors report first decisions in roughly two weeks, is consistent with what we see: most attrition happens at the two-stage pre-check, before external reviewers weigh in, and these four patterns are why.

New polymers reported without complete characterization. The single most common stall we see on synthesis-led Polymers manuscripts is a new material introduced without the characterization a polymer reviewer treats as mandatory.

The paper reports an application or a property, but the molecular weight and dispersity from GPC or SEC are missing, the thermal behavior from DSC or TGA is absent or partial, and the structural confirmation from NMR or FTIR is a single representative spectrum rather than full assignment.

The figures look complete to a non-specialist, but a polymer reviewer reads the methods section and asks the obvious question: do I actually know what this material is? When the characterization is incomplete, the contribution cannot be evaluated, and the manuscript is returned at or near the pre-check regardless of how promising the application figures look.

Check whether your Polymers manuscript reports complete polymer characterization →

A novelty case the introduction never states. In a high-volume open-access venue, the editor's first triage question is what this specific paper adds. The frequent failure is an introduction that establishes the topic is important and the field is active but never states what is new in this work. The reader reaches the results without a sentence that says: prior work did X, and this paper does Y for the first time.

Because Polymers publishes a large volume of competent, in-scope work, a manuscript that does not make its own novelty explicit competes poorly even when the science is sound. The fix is one or two sentences at the end of the introduction that name the gap and the contribution, testable against your own draft: if you cannot point to the sentence, the editor cannot find it either.

Check whether your Polymers introduction states a clear novelty case →

The polymer is the vehicle, not the subject. Polymers covers polymer chemistry, physics, characterization, composites, and biopolymers, and a recurring pre-check return is a manuscript whose real contribution is a device, a drug-delivery outcome, a coating performance, or a biomedical result, with the polymer present as one component.

The introduction frames the work around the polymer, but the novel result is a sensor metric, a therapeutic effect, or a structural-engineering property, and the polymer is the enabling material rather than the advance.

Academic Editors at Polymers identify quickly when the macromolecule is the setting rather than the subject, and a manuscript whose genuine contribution would be evaluated more naturally by an applications or biomedical reviewer is consistently flagged as a scope mismatch before review.

A package that fits a sister MDPI journal better than Polymers. MDPI runs several adjacent titles, and the fourth pattern is choosing the wrong one. A general materials study with a polymer phase often fits Materials; a short methods note may fit a methods title; a polysaccharide-centered paper may fit Polysaccharides; an early-stage macromolecular result may fit Macromol.

When the manuscript sits at the boundary, the editorial pre-check at Polymers may decline it as out of central scope and suggest a transfer, which costs a cycle. The fix is to read the aims and scope of the candidate journals against the actual subject of your abstract before you submit, rather than defaulting to Polymers because it is the largest and fastest of the cluster.

This guide tells you what Polymers editors look for; a Manusights review tells you whether YOUR paper passes that screen. A Manusights review checks the characterization completeness, the novelty case, the scope framing, and the declarations block 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 Polymers novelty and characterization readiness check tests whether your characterization depth, novelty case, and scope framing clear the editorial bar this journal applies before peer review.

This guide was built from the Polymers Instructions for Authors, the MDPI editorial-process and ethics pages, the SuSy submission system, MDPI's 2024 impact-factor announcement, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from polymer-science manuscripts. We checked the APC, the two-stage pre-check, the single-blind model, and the data availability requirement against MDPI's own pages, and we cross-checked review-timing figures against MDPI's reported medians and Clarivate JCR 2024 metrics. The failure patterns describe what we see most often when polymer 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, novelty case, scope framing, and declarations are already defensible. Source limitation: MDPI updates APC figures, format 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 submission process
• International Journal of Molecular Sciences submission process
• For the broader cluster, see the materials science journals overview.

Before you upload, run your manuscript through a Polymers submission package check to catch the characterization, novelty, and scope issues editors filter for at the pre-check. The check is free to run (/ai-review) and takes a single upload.