Currently, the tag wiki excerpt for paper-submission defines the scope of this tag as follows:
The process of preparing a scientific manuscript, finding suitable journal or conference and submitting the manuscript for publication.
This seems overly broad to me. There is so much entropy in questions with this tag that it is practically meaningless. It's become a catch-all tag for everything related to publishing academic papers, which we already have in publications. Furthermore,
- "The process of preparing a scientific manuscript" is already covered pretty thoroughly by other tags: writing, formatting, typesetting, and probably some others I haven't thought of.
- On "finding suitable journal or conference" - seems like conference or journal are a more natural fit than paper-submission.
I therefore propose to narrow the scope of the paper-submission tag as follows:
On the process of submitting a paper for review or publication by a conference or journal. Typical questions with this tag relate to selection of preferred or conflicted reviewers, timeline of the submission process, and typesetting or compilation by the publisher.
Examples of questions within the scope of this tag would include:
- Is there any paper submission deadline timezone convention?
- On a Conflict of Interest disclosure, what's the difference between 'ongoing' and 'current'?
- What typesetters do with the submitted paper?
- Is it okay to inquire about the status of a paper when the online submission system shows no update three months after submission?
- How much time is usually left for authors to return page proofs? What happens if I am late?
but would not include other aspects of manuscript preparation, such as deciding what content should go in the paper, or what journal to submit to.
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