Can I submit my manuscript to two journals at the same time?

Hi Akira,

Thank you for reaching out to us with your query. Please note that it is considered highly unethical to submit the same manuscript to more than one journal simultaneously. Almost all of the well-indexed journals do not generally review manuscripts being considered elsewhere. Multiple journal submission at the same time leads to a waste of the journal’s resources. Both the journals would spend time and money on evaluating your paper. Additionally, you would also be utilizing the time of multiple reviewers, most of who would be busy researchers like yourself and would have to take time out of their busy schedules to accommodate the review of your paper. In case the paper gets accepted by both the journals, you would be able to proceed with publishing it in only one of them, thereby wasting  the resources of the other.

Besides ethical considerations, one must also give due consideration to IPR (intellectual property rights). Most journals perform similarity checks prior to peer review. Therefore, a manuscript that is submitted to journal A may get submitted to the repository of the plagiarism detection tool and show up when journal B also runs a similarity check on the same manuscript. If that happens, then your manuscript may get rejected immediately by both of these journals.

The ideal thing to do would be to wait till the editorial decision making process is over at one journal and if your paper gets rejected, you can submit it to another journal. Sometimes the journal itself offers to transfer your paper along with the peer review report to another suitable journal.

However, if you are facing a time crunch and are not able to wait till the process at one journal get over, then you can consider the option of sending pre-submission enquiries to multiple journals before you actually make a submission. You would have to write to the respective editors and give them a brief summary of your work, and check if they would be interested in publishing your paper. One you receive all the replies, you could possibly judge which one of them seems the most interested and proceed with submitting your manuscript to that journal.

Additionally, if you wish to seek professional help with selecting the most suitable journal for your manuscript, you can consider using Enago’s Journal Selection service. Enago maximizes your chances of publication by matching you with the most appropriate journals for your particular research and requirements.