Rejected from Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing? Where to Submit Next

This guide was checked on July 17, 2026 against the current ScienceDirect MSSP guide for authors, ScienceDirect journal page, ScienceDirect journal insights page, Elsevier Article Transfer Service, Elsevier support guidance on transferring rejected manuscripts, and Elsevier's MSSP signal-processing guidance PDF.

Source-supported facts used here:

• MSSP is an interdisciplinary journal in mechanical, aerospace, and civil engineering reporting high-quality scientific advancements from signal and information processing and related topics in engineering dynamics and dynamical systems.
• The current guide says MSSP covers original research on signal and information processing and related topics within engineering dynamics and dynamical systems as required in mechanical, aerospace, and civil engineering.
• Prospective authors must select a single best-fitting subject area during submission.
• Visible subject areas include signal processing in machine and system health monitoring, non-stationary and random vibration, and related MSSP subject lanes.
• Elsevier's transfer guidance says rejected manuscripts can be transferred to more suitable journals in some cases, but authors still need to evaluate fit and may revise.
• Elsevier support guidance names common rejection causes such as wrong journal, narrow appeal, and failure to meet journal standards for focus, novelty, rigor, or clarity.
• The MSSP signal-processing guidance emphasizes relevance to MSSP scope, potential applications, avoiding overly specialized terminology without introduction, and demonstrating suitability for the journal's domain.

Facts intentionally avoided or caveated:

• No acceptance rate, impact factor, current editor name, review-time guarantee, appeal policy, or APC amount is stated as current.
• Existing Manusights MSSP pages were used for sibling contradiction checks and internal routing, not as source of truth for volatile facts.

MSSP rejection signals are useful only if you translate them into a next-journal route.

The central question is whether MSSP rejected the journal owner or the evidence chain. A journal-owner rejection can route quickly. An evidence rejection usually follows the paper.

Do not treat this as a prestige ladder. A rejected MSSP paper about bearing faults, rotor dynamics, structural health monitoring, non-stationary vibration, acoustic emission, prognostics, digital twins, sparse representations, transformers, wavelets, or physics-informed learning may need different next readers.

Rebuilding for MSSP is plausible only when the manuscript still joins two things: a meaningful signal-processing advance and a mechanical, aerospace, or civil engineering dynamics problem.

Good reasons to rebuild:

• The paper solves a real engineering-dynamics limitation rather than only improving a metric.
• The signal-processing method is novel enough compared with established method families.
• The validation can show behavior across operating regimes, loads, faults, structures, sensors, noise, or transfer settings.
• The benchmark can compare against relevant state-of-the-art families and explain failure cases.
• The subject-area choice can be defended from the title, abstract, figures, and cover letter.

Bad reasons to rebuild:

• You want to stay near the same journal tier.
• The mechanical system is only a dataset source.
• The contribution is mainly a neural network, feature extractor, denoiser, optimizer, or predictor without engineering interpretation.
• The validation requires a different rig, field data, load variation, sensor placement study, or out-of-distribution test that you cannot add.

If you rebuild, make the correction visible early. The title, abstract, first figure, method-family comparison, validation table, limitations, data statement, and cover letter should all show the same MSSP reason.

Elsevier's transfer services can reduce administrative friction. They do not decide scientific fit for you.

Accept a transfer when:

• the destination journal owns the revised manuscript's real contribution;
• the rejection was mainly scope, audience, or article-type mismatch;
• the transferred files can be revised before the next editor evaluates them;
• the destination's guide supports the same evidence package.

Pause before accepting when:

• the rejection exposed weak novelty, shallow benchmarks, thin validation, poor data transparency, or mechanical-system overclaiming;
• the suggested journal is only adjacent by publisher, not by reader job;
• the cover letter and abstract would still sound like a rejected MSSP package.

The transfer question is not "can the files move?" It is "will the next editor believe this manuscript belongs here?"

In our pre-submission review work on Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing submissions, the strongest predictor is whether the manuscript has a stable method-system owner from title to conclusion. Manusights internal analysis treats this as a specific rejection pattern: the title, abstract, highlights, first figure, benchmark table, validation design, data statement, limitations, and cover letter must all explain why the method and mechanical system belong together.

Four specific failure patterns decide the next route.

MSSP algorithm-first framing. The abstract leads with a classifier, transformer, denoiser, feature extractor, sparse model, or prognostic architecture, but the engineering-dynamics problem appears late. The repair is to move the mechanical-system limitation into the first screen or route to a signal-processing venue.

MSSP benchmark-table mismatch. The paper compares F1 score, RMSE, accuracy, computation time, or prediction horizon without comparing operating condition, sensor placement, fault severity, load variation, noise profile, machine transfer, physical interpretability, or failure cases. The repair is to make the benchmark table an engineering argument, not only a leaderboard.

MSSP validation without system realism. A public bearing dataset, simulation, laboratory rig, or finite-element model can be useful, but it does not automatically prove MSSP fit. Reviewers need to see what assumptions, data provenance, operating regimes, boundary conditions, and transfer limits mean for the mechanical system.

MSSP wrong-neighbor ownership. If the paper is mainly vibration interpretation, Journal of Sound and Vibration may be cleaner. If it is mainly monitoring-system deployment, Structural Health Monitoring may be cleaner. If it is mainly signal-processing theory, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing may be cleaner. If it is mainly industrial electronics or control implementation, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics may be cleaner.

In practice, we see the highest-risk rejected MSSP packages fail before the final result is debated: the abstract promises a new signal-processing method, the first figure shows a generic pipeline, the benchmark table treats datasets as interchangeable, and the cover letter never explains the mechanical-system consequence. Editors specifically screen for this owner mismatch because MSSP sits between pure signal processing and mechanical-system dynamics.

Before resubmission, we check whether the title, abstract, highlights, method section, benchmark table, validation evidence, data statement, limitations, and cover letter all make the same promise. If one component says "signal processing," another says "vibration," and another says "industrial monitoring," the next editor will see a paper without a stable owner.