Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews Submission Guide: What Editors Screen Before Review

Week 1: Submission intake and editorial screen

The RSER Editorial Manager system verifies template formatting, comprehensive bibliography, supplementary information completeness, and word/figure cap compliance. The handling Elsevier Associate Editor then reads the cover letter, abstract, and table-of-contents structure to assess review-synthesis significance. About 50 to 60 percent of submissions are desk-rejected at this stage.

Week 2: Editorial discussion + Elsevier family routing

Borderline papers are discussed across the RSER editorial team. Some receive transfer offers to other Elsevier energy journals (Applied Energy, Energy, Renewable Energy) where reviewer reports can carry forward.

Weeks 3 to 4: Reviewer recruitment

For papers passing the editorial screen, 2 to 3 reviewers are recruited with energy subfield expertise.

Weeks 5 to 12: External peer review

Reviewers evaluate review-synthesis depth, bibliography comprehensiveness, technology-analysis rigor, and renewable/sustainable energy framing.

Weeks 12 to 20: Reviewer-report synthesis and revision rounds

Handling editor integrates reports. Major-revision decisions specify the additional synthesis depth, bibliography additions, or analytical framing required.

Run a Renewable Sustainable Energy Reviews pre-submission readiness check before clicking submit, or work through this guide manually.

Official Elsevier pages answer the formal guide-for-authors questions: article types, open access, ethics, declarations, abstract and title-page rules, research data, and online submission. They do not decide the harder author question: whether the manuscript is an RSER-style synthesis paper or a standard energy paper with a long literature review attached.

This guide separates translating the journal's scope into editorial screen logic: whether the title, abstract, comparison frame, nearest-competing-review paragraph, and cover letter prove a new synthesis contribution before the editor reaches the methods.

How this page was created: sources used include the Elsevier guide for authors, the RSER journal page, Elsevier open-access and author-support pages, a review of the 100 most recent RSER papers used when this guide was built, and recent Manusights pre-submission reviews from authors considering RSER, Renewable Energy, Applied Energy, Energy, and Journal of Cleaner Production.

Source limitations: we did not test a private live Editorial Manager account. Portal mechanics are based on public Elsevier materials. Manusights interpretation is separate from official guidance and focuses on a specific failure pattern we see in pre-submission work: authors submit a literature-rich manuscript without proving the synthesis, critique, or comparison that makes it an RSER paper.

The practical submission question for RSER is not just whether the topic is in renewable energy. The journal is asking three harder questions:

1. what article type is this, exactly?
2. what does it add beyond existing literature?
3. why does the journal's interdisciplinary energy readership need this paper now?

That matters because the current guide is explicit on several points:

• authors should state the article type in the cover letter
• review articles are guided at up to 10,000 words
• research articles are guided at up to 8,000 words, but only if they include a significant review element
• special issue articles are by invitation only

So the real fit test is whether the manuscript is literature-led enough to belong in RSER's editorial culture, not whether it merely touches energy and sustainability.

One important consequence follows from this: redundancy is often judged before writing quality. If the manuscript does not clearly earn its existence relative to the literature already out there, it is hard to rescue later.

The standard research paper with a longer introduction. This is the most common article-type miss. A normal experimental or modeling paper does not become an RSER paper just because the literature review is bigger than usual.

A review that never becomes synthesis. The manuscript may cite hundreds of papers, but if it never compares, critiques, or resolves anything, it still reads as a literature inventory.

A topic that is too broad to do serious work. Reviews that try to cover an entire energy field often collapse into a survey with no analytical edge.

A topic that is already well-covered without a new frame. Editors will not be persuaded by "the field is growing quickly" if the nearest existing review already addresses the same question.

A paper that confuses technology enthusiasm with critical thinking. RSER's mission statement is unusually explicit about relevant critical thinking. That means the journal values tension, tradeoffs, contradictions, deployment barriers, and comparative judgment.

Start with the official rules for upload mechanics, then judge the draft itself. The review tells you whether YOUR paper passes the Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews fit screen before upload, especially around article type unclear between review, technology analysis, and research article, encyclopedic literature coverage without a thesis-driven synthesis, and nearest competing review not addressed directly. Paid Manusights reviews include a 60-day money-back guarantee, and we do not train models on submitted manuscripts.

In our pre-submission review work with review and energy-synthesis manuscripts targeting Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, three failure patterns repeatedly appear before authors open the Editorial Manager RSER upload. Each one is visible in the abstract, article-type choice, review method, evidence tables, references, figures, and cover letter before peer review begins.

Article type unclear between review, technology analysis, and research article

In our pre-submission review work on RSER-targeting manuscripts, we repeatedly see that editors actually screen article type and redundancy before they screen prose quality. Authors often believe the hardest part is writing a strong review. In practice, the first hurdle is whether the paper is the right kind of manuscript for the journal at all.

The risk shows up when the abstract calls the paper a review, the methods section behaves like a normal modeling or experimental paper, the figures report one case study, and the cover letter says the manuscript has a "significant review component" without proving that the literature synthesis is the contribution. Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews can publish review papers, new technology analyses with respect to existing literature, and original studies with a significant review element, but the manuscript has to choose one lane clearly. The fix is to name the article type in the cover letter, make the first table or figure show the synthesis architecture, and ensure the methods explain how the literature was selected, compared, and interpreted.

Check whether your Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews manuscript passes the article type unclear between review, technology analysis, and research article screen →

Encyclopedic literature coverage without a thesis-driven synthesis

We also see that the strongest RSER papers are thesis-driven rather than encyclopedic. They are not merely long. They are organized around a comparative question, a contradiction, a transition in the technology landscape, or a literature gap that matters to energy decision-making.

This pattern is visible when the section headings march through technologies, countries, materials, or policies one by one, while the figures and tables summarize papers rather than adjudicating a question. The manuscript may have hundreds of references, but the abstract does not tell readers what changed after reading them. RSER editors and reviewers need the review method, comparative matrix, figures, and conclusion to create a decision-relevant synthesis rather than a bibliography expansion. The fix is to identify the specific unresolved question, build each table around that question, and remove sections whose only function is cataloging prior studies.

Check whether your Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews manuscript passes the encyclopedic literature coverage without a thesis-driven synthesis screen →

Nearest competing review not addressed directly

Our analysis of manuscripts targeting RSER shows that the best submissions can name the nearest competing review and explain, in one direct paragraph, why the current paper still needs to exist. We have found that editors specifically screen for whether the paper creates a new synthesis frame rather than just extending the bibliography. When that frame is weak, the manuscript can be technically polished and still feel unnecessary.

The current official guide reinforces that logic. It does not say "reviews only" in the simplistic way many authors assume. Instead, it creates a narrower and more useful rule: the paper must be literature-led enough that article type, word count, and cover-letter framing all make sense together.

Check whether your Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews manuscript passes the nearest competing review not addressed directly screen →