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Lang Nunnally
Let me first state my strong opinion, and ask everyone to agree, that for an editor to not answer a request for acknowledgement of a submission in a reasonable amount of time, assuming they actually received your email, is inappropriate and unprofessional. Yes, we have probably all seen such behavior. I don't care that it happens, maybe even not infrequently; I don't care that editors are overworked, busy, tired, absent-minded, or that they are volunteers who are not paid for their services (note: unpaid, but not uncompensated, since they very much enjoy the prestige that comes with being a journal editor, and in many cases receive benefits such as a teaching reduction at their institution). A journal is a professional entity and needs to conduct itself professionally. If you are an editor, you signed up, voluntarily I assume, to perform a job, so there is simply no justification for not doing that job. So, repeat after me: not acknowledging a submission, especially when requested, is wrong. Feels good, doesn't it? ;-)
The point is that if nagging the editor makes them angry or annoyed, I don't see that as a problem. It is 100% the editor's fault that they are being nagged, not the OP's fault for nagging. And if their anger leads them to treat the OP's submission vindictively in some way (as the OP seems to worry it might), then that editor is an unprofessional loser, and their behavior reflects very poorly on the journal. In that case I would seriously advise the OP to consider not publishing in such a journal and seeking a fairer treatment elsewhere. (Also, as @user24094 commented, an angry response is at least a response!)
Many years ago I submitted a short paper to a good journal. I don't remember if I received an acknowledgement, but I definitely did not receive a referee report... until two years later, when an apologetic email from the editor came. He confessed with embarrassment that my submission had been on his desk that was stacked with lots of other papers so that he lost track of my submission, and that at one point my paper fell into the crack between the desk and the wall, where he now found it while cleaning up his office. (I guess in those days some submissions were not handled electronically.) To my surprise (since I myself had some misgivings about the paper and had given it up as being possibly unpublishable) he then added he liked the paper very much and would be happy to accept it, assuming I was still interested, which of course I was.
A couple of years ago I saw in my files a note about an old gmail account I had set up to receive email forwarded from an institution I had left several years before. I had completely forgotten about the existence of that account, so I logged in to see if there was anything important there. I assumed there wouldn't be, since anyone who is trying to reach me can just google my name to get to my current home page on which I list my current email address - right? Well, to my surprise, I found on the old gmail account a series of increasingly desperate emails from the editor of a certain combinatorics journal, asking me to referee a paper, then some months later asking if I had received the earlier email, then asking for an acknowledgement, etc.... What seems to have happened is that the journal had some kind of automatic system for tracking the email addresses of authors who published there (obviously a bad idea), and the editor was sending me those emails through the automated system instead of doing the sensible thing of just looking for my email address and sending me an ordinary email.
To summarize, my advice to the OP is to consistently nag the editor, including indirectly through any intermediaries you can think of (editorial assistant, managing editor, colleague at the editor's department etc.), every week for a few weeks. If you do not hear back after 2-3 weeks I would assume that the submission had not been received, write one final email in which you politely inform the editor that you are withdrawing the submission due to the lack of response, and submit the paper elsewhere.
Keep in mind that not everything that appears in a scholarly journal has been peer reviewed. Journals publish various types of content, including book reviews, editorials, letters to the editor and, sometimes, even poetry.
This broad category describes research papers that have not been peer reviewed or published in a journal. Working papers can be in various stages of completion. One might be ready for publication in a prestigious journal while another requires significant editing and other changes that could actually alter its main findings. Sometimes, working paper findings are so preliminary, authors will advise against citing their work.
Even so, working papers are a great way for journalists to gain access to new research quickly. The peer-review and publication process can take months to a year or longer, which means that by the time studies get published, their findings are sometimes not as useful or the data are old.
Looking for more guidance on writing about research? Check out our tip sheets on covering biomedical research preprints amid the coronavirus and what journalists should know about peer review.
The URNCST Journal team prides itself on its commitment to advocate for undergraduate STEM research. In our endeavours to promote undergraduate research, we have published a number of papers from undergraduate research competitions and case competitions. From these ventures, we have identified a couple of themes that were found to recur independently as follows: 1) undergraduate students are extremely keen to use their critical thinking skills to participate in research endeavours that recognize their valuable work and 2) there exists a subset of students who desire to contribute to undergraduate STEM research but due to one reason or another are unable to take part in such research or feel as if they may need closer guidance during the writing process. Despite this, many thousands of undergraduate students across the globe play crucial roles in making new discoveries every single year.
Eligibility to Participate: The mentored paper is open to authors who are enrolled in an undergraduate (i.e. BSc, BEng, BA, etc.) or professional-undergraduate (i.e. MD, DDS, PharmD, OD, RN, etc.) degree program.
About the Initiative: Undergraduate students participating in the URNCST Journal Mentored Paper are required to draft and submit an abstract on a topic that is of interest to them based on the questions provided below. This abstract must be in the format of either 1) a research protocol (i.e. a plan to conduct a study) OR 2) a review (i.e. a review of the currently existing literature); it is not acceptable to simply summarize a single study already published in the literature by an academic journal. Students may submit an abstract alone or in teams of up to 3. These abstracts will be reviewed for suitability (i.e. understanding of topic, writing ability), and accepted students will be paired with the graduate student who proposed the topic and will mentor the undergraduate (team) in drafting a manuscript that is of suitable quality to undergo peer-review by the URNCST Journal. As participants will be under the guidance of a graduate student, they are not required to have a complete understanding of the topic, but should have done their due diligence in reading about the topic online and have the motivation and dedication to learn from the mentoring graduate student.
Topics Available: Please see below for a complete list of the available research topics for the manuscripts. Please note that these are the only questions accepted students should write on and they are not subject to change.
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Think of the last time you hung out in your favorite café for a drink, dessert, or a delicious snack. Do you remember the heady scent of coffee? The calming music playing softly from the speakers? How about the unique way sunlight or streetlight poured into the room from the windows? Were people on their own or in little groups? Was the noise level gentle and intimate, or louder than usual and fun? Was everyone on their smartphones or laptops? Were any of them using a pen and paper?
Now hold on - let's be honest here. If anyone had a pen and paper on them and were using it, they would've been easy to remember. And why wouldn't they be memorable when most of us are on our electronic devices nowadays, eyes glued on a glowing screen? You'll be hard pressed to find anyone not tapping away on a keyboard, may it be analog or virtual - so anything that's the opposite of the norm is bound to stand out. For a lot of different reasons, harnessing technology is just easier and more convenient. But when it comes to the benefits of journaling, which one is really the best medium:
It's worth noting that journaling by paper has been done for thousands of years, one of the earliest accounts being a diary from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the 2nd century AD. In contrast, the first digital diary was written between 1994 and 1996, called "Open Diary" and posted on the MIT Media Lab by Claudio Pinhanez. Undoubtedly, the analog form has been the top choice for a longer period of time, but is it only because technology wasn't quite as accessible then and more of a recent thing we've only really started to utilize? Given the chance, would Marcus Aurelius have used a cloud-based app on his iPad to bemoan the life of a Roman Emperor who was in the middle of campaigning and administration?
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