Editorial Manager is very customizable. During the set up of your journal on Editorial Manager, different types of submissions may have been included as countable submissions. For Editorial Manager users, Origin Reports has an Editorial Status filter which allows users to adjust what type of status will be counted as submissions.

Among the possible editorial status terms that may be in your dataset are submissions that do not yet have a revision number (noted in Origin Reports as No Rev). For most journals, submissions do not receive a revision number until it is assigned to an Editor. You may also see No ID at the end of some of the editorial status. For some journals, submissions do not receive a manuscript number until it is assigned to an editor. For these journals, the No ID will be added to the status to indicate that the submission does not yet have a manuscript number. You may also see Sent Back to Author or Incomplete, these statuses indicate that the submission is not yet viable for assignment to an editor.

The default setting for Origin Reports is to count all editorial status as submissions. This setting enables us to match the Editorial Manager submissions counts for most journals. If your submission counts in Origin Reports do not match the submission counts from Editorial Manager, we are happy to help you with the filter settings if needed.

For more information on the Editorial Status filter for Editorial Manager data, read: https://help.originreports.org/en/articles/4985793-understanding-editorial-status-for-editorial-manager-csv-files

Origin Reports uses the manuscript number or the unique document ID for submission counts. If a manuscript is rejected and later resubmitted such that it is assigned a new manuscript number or unique document ID, then this resubmission is counted as a new manuscript. Like Editorial Manager and ScholarOne, Origin Reports does not have a way to identify a manuscript that was previously submitted to the journal.

Origin Reports allows you to choose between using the Initial Date Submitted or the First Receipt Date as your reference date for submissions charts. The Initial Date Submitted is a dynamic date field. In the event that a submission is sent back to the author at initial check-in, the Initial Date Submitted field is updated to the date that the author makes the required changes and resubmits the manuscript. The date that the manuscript is resubmitted becomes the Initial Date Submitted. For this event, the First Receipt Date is not updated. Most journals prefer to use the Initial Date Submitted since it starts the clock at the time that the journal had a viable submission. The First Receipt Date can make a journal’s editorial office performance appear to be uneven due to the time that the submission was back with the author.

For more info, please read the Help Center article: Initial Date Submitted vs First Receipt Date in Editorial Manager. (https://help.originreports.org/en/articles/4957915-initial-date-submitted-vs-first-receipt-date-in-editorial-manager)

A reference date is the data point that we use to group your manuscripts. For example, if the initial date submitted is used as a reference date for initial decision charts, then all manuscripts would be grouped according to the date they were submitted to the journal. A manuscript submitted in January of 2021 and a manuscript submitted in December of 2021 would both be included in the 2021 bar of that chart. If the initial decision date is used as a reference date, then all manuscripts that received a decision in 2021 would be grouped together in the 2021 bar on your chart, regardless of when they were submitted. For more information on reference dates, please read this Help Center article: The Importance of Selecting the Best Reference Date for Your Charts (https://help.originreports.org/en/articles/6102104-the-importance-of-selecting-the-best-reference-date-for-your-charts

In Origin Reports, you can choose to use either Initial Date Submitted or First Receipt Date. The Initial Date Submitted is a dynamic date field and the First Receipt Data is a static (unchanging) value. For more info, please read the Help Center article: Initial Date Submitted vs First Receipt Date in Editorial Manager. (https://help.originreports.org/en/articles/4957915-initial-date-submitted-vs-first-receipt-date-in-editorial-manager)

Origin Reports uses the date that the decision was entered into Editorial Manager by the editor as the reference date for Initial Decision charts (field: Date of First Decision) and Final Decision charts (field: Final Decision Date). We use the decision dates because using the submission date can obscure any trends that might be seen in the data due to editorial changes in policy or staff. Read the suggested Help Center article suggested at the end of this section for more details.

For Editor charts, we use the date the editor was assigned (field: Date Editor Accepted Assignment). For reviewer charts, we use the date the reviewer was invited (field: Date Reviewer Invited).)

For more information on reference dates, please read this Help Center article: The Importance of Selecting the Best Reference Date for Your Charts (https://help.originreports.org/en/articles/6102104-the-importance-of-selecting-the-best-reference-date-for-your-charts

For your “timing” charts (such as Time to Initial Decision, Time to Final Decision, etc.), you can use a decision filter located in the left-hand menu to choose to exclude any immediate decisions (desk rejects, immediate accepts, etc.). Excluding these faster submissions, ensures that the journal has a more accurate reported average for the time that a typical peer reviewed manuscript takes to reach a decision. The user can decide whether to group reject or accept initial decisions for submissions that did not go through peer review in with the immediate reject/accept decisions (for example: An editor is assigned a manuscript that they reject without peer review but the manuscript receives a Reject decision rather than a Desk Reject or Immediate Reject decision.) In Origin Reports, the user is able to determine how these types of decisions will be grouped. If they are grouped in with the immediate decisions, then they can be filtered out of your timing charts. The responses to these grouping questions can be changed in the User Preferences section of the app.

Note: Answering the questions in the User Preferences section only dictates how these types of decisions will be grouped. It does not remove the decisions from the counts shown in the charts. The user must use the filter to exclude them. The process is shown in this short tutorial video: https://youtu.be/NakdMWEtjyk (3 minutes)

The date range of the data, as well as all filter settings (anything that is specifically included or excluded) is noted in the Chart Parameters section of the chart and included in the download of that chart. This helps users to understand exactly what data the chart is showing. Example: https://www.screencast.com/t/8ij88DdynjY

Any chart that is saved into MyCharts can be reproduced in the future by uploading the most recent dataset from your manuscript handling system and clicking the Generate Chart button. Any Custom Report can be reproduced by clicking the Generate button. We do not save your data. When you log out, you data is removed. We only save the chart parameters so that the charts can be recreated later when a new dataset is uploaded.