Editorial Manager and ScholarOne: Troubleshooting Common Submission…

Quick Answer

Submitting a manuscript through Editorial Manager or ScholarOne Manuscripts should feel like the easy part of your research journey. The science is done, the writing is finished, and the platform is just a delivery mechanism. In practice, that is rarely how international PhD and Master's researchers experience it. The systems are powerful but unforgiving, and a single uninformed click can delay your publication by weeks or trigger an automatic desk rejection.

This guide walks you through the submission errors we see most often, how to fix them quickly, and how to prevent them on the next paper. Whether you are publishing your first SCOPUS-indexed article from a lab in Riyadh, finishing a Master's thesis in Toronto, or preparing a clinical study for a Wiley journal in Singapore, the troubleshooting principles are the same.

Understanding Editorial Manager and ScholarOne

Before you can troubleshoot effectively, you need to know which platform you are on and how it behaves. Editorial Manager and ScholarOne process tens of thousands of submissions every day, but they each have their own rules about file formats, metadata, and PDF assembly.

Editorial Manager (Aries Systems)

Editorial Manager is owned by Elsevier and used by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wolters Kluwer, and many medical and engineering society journals. Its hallmark is the automatic PDF build step: after upload, the system stitches your manuscript, figures, tables, and supplementary files into a single review-ready PDF. If anything in your file set is incompatible, the build fails. The submission is not lost, but it is held until you fix the issue.

ScholarOne Manuscripts (Clarivate)

ScholarOne is operated by Clarivate and used by Wiley, Taylor and Francis, SAGE, IEEE for many of its journals, and a long list of society publishers. ScholarOne tends to be stricter on metadata: author affiliations, ORCID identifiers, funding statements, keyword counts, and conflict-of-interest declarations are all validated against the manuscript text. A mismatch will usually block your submission rather than silently accept it.

The Most Common Submission Errors and How to Fix Them

Across both platforms, roughly five categories account for nearly every error a researcher will hit. Work through them in this order.

1. PDF Build Failures

The classic Editorial Manager error. It usually means the platform could not embed a font, render a figure, or merge a file. The fix is almost always at the source: re-export your manuscript as a clean Word .docx using only standard fonts (Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri), flatten figures into TIFF or 300 dpi JPEG, and remove any password protection from the document. Avoid pasting figures from PowerPoint — export them first as separate image files.

2. Metadata Mismatches

This is the most common ScholarOne error and often what blocks an otherwise correct paper. The system compares your manuscript title page with the metadata you typed into its forms. If the affiliation lists "Department of Biotech" on the title page but "Biotechnology Dept." in the form, the validator will flag it. Always copy and paste from the title page, never re-type from memory. Fix the same way for ORCID, funder name, and grant number.

3. Author Order and Corresponding Author Errors

Co-author lists are a frequent source of last-minute panic. Both platforms require every co-author to be entered as a separate user with a valid email address, and the corresponding author flag must match the title page. If a co-author has not yet activated their account, the submission can stall on confirmation. Send the activation email well in advance — ideally a week before you plan to submit.

4. Reference Style and Word Count Violations

Most desk rejections we see are not about the science — they are about formatting. A Vancouver-style journal will reject a paper with APA citations. A 5,000-word ceiling will desk-reject a 6,200-word manuscript regardless of how strong the data are. Re-read the journal's "Author Guidelines" page line by line before submission. If you are switching from a different journal, run your references through a reference manager (Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley) and re-export in the new style. For deeper guidance on getting references right, see our companion article on APA vs MLA citation styles.

5. Figure and Table Resolution Errors

Most journals require 300 dpi for line art at print size, 600 dpi for half-tones, and TIFF or EPS for vector content. Editorial Manager will warn you in the build log; ScholarOne will simply reject the upload. If your figure was generated in R, Python, or MATLAB, re-export at the required dpi rather than scaling up a screen-resolution image.

System-Specific Quirks You Should Know

Beyond the general categories, each platform has habits worth memorising before your next submission.

Editorial Manager Quirks

• Build queue delays. The PDF build can take from a few minutes to several hours during peak times. Do not re-upload if the status shows "Building" — you will create duplicate submissions.
• File order matters. The order in which you upload files is the order they appear in the merged PDF. Drag-and-drop the files into the correct sequence before clicking "Build."
• Highlighted revisions. For revised submissions, Editorial Manager expects a separate "marked-up" version with track changes plus a clean version. Submitting only one will trigger a request for the other.

ScholarOne Quirks

• Mandatory keyword fields. ScholarOne often forces you to pick keywords from a controlled vocabulary, not the ones in your manuscript. Match as closely as possible and add free-text keywords only if the journal allows.
• Cover letter as a separate file. Many ScholarOne journals require the cover letter as a distinct upload, not pasted into the form. Confirm before you submit.
• ORCID validation. ScholarOne pings the ORCID API in real time. If your co-author's ORCID is not linked to a verified email, the submission will pause.

A Pre-Submission Checklist That Saves Hours

Run through this list the night before you submit. It takes thirty minutes and prevents most of the errors above.

1. Title page lists every author with full institutional affiliation, country, and corresponding author email.
2. Manuscript word count is below the journal limit, including or excluding references as the guidelines specify.
3. Reference list is in the journal's required style with no broken DOIs.
4. Figures exported at the journal's stated dpi, in TIFF, EPS, or 300 dpi JPEG.
5. Tables embedded in the manuscript and also uploaded as editable Word files when required.
6. Supplementary materials labelled and described in the manuscript text.
7. Cover letter ready as a separate document with manuscript title, type, and journal fit statement.
8. Conflict of interest, funding statement, ethics approval, and data availability statement included.
9. Co-authors notified that confirmation emails are coming and have valid ORCID iDs linked.
10. Final copy of the manuscript in PDF (for your records) and Word (for upload) saved with version date.

If your manuscript is part of a larger doctoral project, our end-to-end PhD thesis and synopsis support can help you align chapter material with journal-ready papers, so each submission carries the same evidence base and methodology language.

When the Error Is Not the Platform — It Is the Manuscript

Sometimes Editorial Manager and ScholarOne are merely the messenger. A "PDF build failed" warning can mask deeper problems: an introduction that does not match the journal's scope, a methods section missing ethics approval, or a results section without statistical detail. If you keep clearing platform-level errors only to be desk rejected within 48 hours, the real issue is the manuscript itself, not the upload.

This is where many international researchers benefit from a structured pre-submission review. A subject specialist reads the paper against the target journal's recent issues, flags scope mismatches, tightens the abstract, and rewrites weak passages. The platform errors fall away because the underlying file is correct from the start. For more on strengthening the foundations of an academic paper, see our guides on writing a strong literature review and 10 tips for better academic writing.

Pulling It All Together

Editorial Manager and ScholarOne are not designed to defeat you. They are designed to enforce the conventions that publishers have agreed make peer review consistent and traceable. Once you know what each platform is checking, the error messages stop feeling random and start feeling diagnostic. PDF build issues mean a file problem. Metadata errors mean a title-page mismatch. Reference and word count errors mean the manuscript was prepared for a different journal.

Many of the researchers we support are juggling teaching loads, supervisor pressure, visa timelines, and revision deadlines. They simply do not have a free week to re-format figures or rebuild a reference list overnight. That is exactly where our team comes in. Our PhD-qualified experts have helped researchers across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia move from "submission failed" to "manuscript under review" without losing momentum.

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