When Your Manuscript Is Multidisciplinary

By Dr. Zubair Khalid, DVM, MS, PhD · 2026-08-27

Quick Answer

• Match your manuscript to journals that publish work spanning multiple disciplines by examining their editorial boards, recent articles, and stated scope for genuine cross-field engagement.
• Use reporting guidelines from the EQUATOR Network to structure your methods so reviewers from different fields can assess your work fairly.
• Expect that interdisciplinary work may require more revision cycles because each field's reviewers will apply their own standards, so plan your submission timeline accordingly.

Understanding the Multidisciplinary Manuscript Problem

A multidisciplinary manuscript draws on methods, theories, or data from more than one established field. A study might combine animal science with environmental economics, or veterinary medicine with data science. The work is valuable precisely because it connects domains that usually operate separately. But that same quality creates a practical problem at submission time.

Most journals define themselves by a primary discipline. Their editorial boards, reviewer pools, and readership expectations all reflect that identity. When your manuscript crosses boundaries, you face a mismatch. The journal that publishes excellent animal nutrition research may not have reviewers who can evaluate your economic modeling. The journal that publishes sophisticated statistical methods may not understand the husbandry context that makes your data meaningful.

This mismatch produces a specific pattern of rejection. Editors may desk-reject your manuscript because they cannot identify an appropriate editor. Reviewers may accept the methods from their own field but reject the unfamiliar components. Or the journal may accept your work but place it in a section that reaches few of the readers who need it.

The solution is not to hide the multidisciplinary nature of your work. It is to find journals that have built the infrastructure to evaluate and publish it. That infrastructure includes editors with cross-disciplinary experience, reviewers drawn from multiple fields, and a stated commitment to work that does not fit conventional categories.

At a Glance

Criteria for Identifying Genuine Interdisciplinary Scope

Examine the Editorial Board Structure

The editorial board is the first place to look for evidence of genuine interdisciplinary capacity. A journal that publishes multidisciplinary work needs editors who can judge whether a manuscript makes a valid contribution to each field it touches. Look at the board roster and ask whether the members represent the specific combination of fields your manuscript uses.

A manuscript combining animal welfare science with machine learning needs editors who understand both behavioral assessment and algorithmic validation. If the board has animal scientists but no one with computational expertise, the journal may accept the welfare content but struggle to evaluate the technical methods. The reverse problem appears when a journal has strong methods editors but no one who understands the biological or agricultural context.

Check whether board members actually publish across fields. An editor whose publication record stays entirely within one specialty may not be equipped to judge work that spans specialties. Look for editors who have co-authored with colleagues from other disciplines or who have published methodological work that transfers across domains.

Read the Scope Statement Carefully

Journal scope statements vary in precision. Some describe a broad intellectual territory. Others list specific topics and exclude everything else. For a multidisciplinary manuscript, you need a scope statement that explicitly welcomes work at the intersection of fields.

Look for language about interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or transdisciplinary research. Some journals use the term systems thinking to describe work that connects biological, social, and environmental dimensions. Others describe themselves as covering the interface between two named fields.

Be cautious with scope statements that use broad terms like applied science or life sciences without specifying how the journal handles cross-field work. A broad scope statement does not guarantee that the editorial process can handle a manuscript that genuinely spans fields. The practical test is whether the journal has published work similar to yours in the past two years.

Review the Recent Article Mix

The most reliable evidence of a journal's interdisciplinary capacity is its recent publication record. Look at the last two years of tables of contents. Count how many articles cite literature from more than one field. Check whether authors come from diverse departmental affiliations. Note whether the journal publishes methods papers, data papers, or synthesis articles that do not fit conventional categories.

A journal that claims interdisciplinary scope but publishes only single-discipline studies is not a good match. The editorial process may not have developed the habits needed to evaluate cross-field work. Reviewers may not be accustomed to judging unfamiliar methods. The production team may not know how to handle supplementary materials that include code, datasets, or multimedia.

Investigate the Peer Review Process

Peer review is where multidisciplinary manuscripts succeed or fail. A journal can have an impressive board and a welcoming scope statement, but if the review process cannot assemble the right reviewers, your manuscript will struggle.

Look for information about how the journal assigns reviewers. Some journals use a single editor who handles all submissions and selects reviewers from a personal network. Others use a team of editors with different specialties who can divide the evaluation of a multidisciplinary manuscript. The team model is generally better for cross-field work because it allows each component of your manuscript to receive expert scrutiny.

Check whether the journal has a process for finding reviewers outside its usual network. A journal that publishes interdisciplinary work needs to recruit reviewers from multiple fields, sometimes on short notice. Look for evidence that the journal has a broad reviewer database or partnerships with other journals and societies.

Practical Workflow for Journal Selection

Step 1: Define Your Manuscript's Disciplinary Components

Before you search for journals, write down every field that your manuscript touches. Be specific. A manuscript about methane emissions from dairy farms might involve animal nutrition, atmospheric chemistry, agricultural economics, and policy analysis. Each of those fields has its own methods, literature, and standards of evidence.

List the methods you used and the fields those methods come from. List the literature you cite and the fields that literature represents. List the potential audiences for your findings and the fields those audiences work in. This list becomes your screening tool for evaluating journals.

Step 2: Build a Candidate Journal List

Start with the journals you already read and cite. Add journals that have published work similar to yours. Use journal finder tools from publishers, but treat their suggestions as a starting point instead of a final answer. These tools match keywords and abstracts, but they cannot assess whether a journal has the editorial infrastructure to handle your specific combination of fields.

Ask colleagues in each of your manuscript's fields for journal suggestions. A colleague in animal science will know different journals than a colleague in economics. The overlap between their suggestions is where you are most likely to find a genuine interdisciplinary match.

Step 3: Screen Each Candidate Against Your Criteria

Apply the criteria from the previous section to each candidate journal. Examine the editorial board. Read the scope statement. Review the recent article mix. Investigate the peer review process. Score each journal on how well it matches your manuscript's disciplinary components.

Keep a record of your screening. Note which journals have editors in your specific fields, which have published work using your specific methods, and which have review processes that can handle cross-field evaluation. This record will help you if your first-choice journal rejects your manuscript and you need to move to the next candidate.

Step 4: Contact the Editor Before Submission

A presubmission inquiry can save you weeks. Write a brief email to the editor describing your manuscript's topic, methods, and the fields it spans. Ask whether the journal can evaluate work of this type. Include your abstract and a note about which editors on the board might handle your submission.

Editors appreciate these inquiries because they prevent mismatched submissions. A good editor will tell you honestly whether your manuscript fits the journal's scope and review capacity. Some editors will suggest a different journal that is a better match. That advice is valuable even when it is not what you want to hear.

Step 5: Prepare Your Submission for Cross-Field Review

Once you have selected a journal, prepare your manuscript to be evaluated by reviewers who may not share your home discipline. Define every specialized term. Explain why you chose each method. Describe the limitations of your approach in language that a generalist can understand.

Use reporting guidelines from the EQUATOR Network to structure your methods and results. These guidelines help you report your work transparently so reviewers from different fields can assess its validity. The EQUATOR Network maintains a collection of reporting guidelines for different study types, and selecting the right one for your design improves the clarity of your submission.

Records and Measurements for Submission Tracking

Maintain a Submission Log

Track every submission in a structured log. Record the journal name, submission date, manuscript number, and the editor assigned. Note the disciplinary composition of the reviewers when that information becomes available. Record the dates of each review milestone and the outcome.

This log serves two purposes. It prevents you from submitting the same manuscript to multiple journals simultaneously, which violates publication ethics. It also gives you data about which journals actually handle multidisciplinary work well. After two or three submissions, you will see patterns in how different journals treat cross-field manuscripts.

Document Reviewer Feedback by Discipline

When reviews come back, categorize the feedback by the field it comes from. A reviewer from your home discipline may focus on the novelty of your findings. A reviewer from a neighboring field may focus on the appropriateness of your methods. A reviewer from a distant field may focus on the clarity of your explanations.

This categorization helps you revise strategically. You may need to add background material for one field while strengthening evidence for another. You may need to move technical details to supplementary materials so they do not obscure your main argument. You may need to add a limitations section that addresses concerns from fields you did not anticipate.

Track Revision Cycles

Multidisciplinary manuscripts often require more revision cycles than single-discipline work. Each round of review may bring new reviewers with new concerns. Track how many rounds each journal requires and what types of changes each round demands.

This data informs your future submission decisions. A journal that requires three rounds of revision for every interdisciplinary manuscript may not be worth the time investment. A journal that handles cross-field work in one or two rounds has a more efficient process.

Common Failure Patterns in Multidisciplinary Submission

The Scope Mismatch Rejection

The most common failure is submitting to a journal whose scope does not actually cover your manuscript. The editor reads your abstract, sees a topic that does not match the journal's usual content, and returns your manuscript without review. This rejection is fast, but it wastes your time and delays your publication timeline.

Prevent this failure by applying the screening criteria before submission. If the journal has not published anything like your work in the past two years, the editor will likely reject it. If the editorial board has no one who can evaluate your methods, the editor will likely reject it. Do not assume that a broad scope statement means your manuscript will be considered.

The Reviewer Expertise Gap

A more frustrating failure occurs when the editor accepts your manuscript for review but cannot find reviewers who understand all its components. You may receive three reviews, each from a different field, and each review may miss the point of your work. One reviewer may reject your methods because they are unfamiliar. Another may reject your conclusions because they do not match the literature from their field.

This failure pattern is difficult to prevent because you cannot control reviewer selection. You can reduce its likelihood by writing your manuscript so that each field's contribution is clear and self-contained. A reviewer from animal science should be able to evaluate your husbandry methods without understanding your economic model. A reviewer from economics should be able to evaluate your model without understanding your animal science.

The Interdisciplinary Penalty

Some journals accept multidisciplinary work but treat it as a lower priority. The manuscript may receive slower review, less experienced reviewers, or a lower placement in the journal. This penalty is rarely stated explicitly, but it appears in the data if you track submission outcomes across journals.

Watch for signs of this penalty. A long delay between submission and assignment to an editor may indicate that the journal is struggling to find a suitable editor. Reviews that focus on peripheral issues instead of your core contribution may indicate that reviewers do not understand your work. A decision letter that praises your manuscript but suggests a different journal may indicate that the editor does not see your work as central to the journal's mission.

Welfare and Safety Context for Animal-Related Multidisciplinary Work

Ethical Review Requirements

If your manuscript involves animal subjects, you must document ethical review from your institution. The National Institutes of Health requires that research it funds comply with all applicable laws, regulations, and policies governing the care and use of animals. Your manuscript should state the approval body and the approval number for your protocol.

Different countries have different requirements for animal research ethics. The United States has its own regulatory framework, and other countries have their own. Your manuscript should describe the ethical framework you followed without assuming that readers know the requirements of your jurisdiction.

Data Management and Sharing

Multidisciplinary work often generates complex datasets that combine biological, environmental, and social measurements. The NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy describes expectations for planning how data will be managed and shared. Even if your research is not NIH-funded, following these expectations improves the reproducibility of your work.

Plan your data management before you submit. Decide what data will be shared, where it will be deposited, and how it will be documented. Multidisciplinary datasets are harder to share than single-discipline datasets because they require documentation that spans multiple fields. A reviewer from one field may not understand the data conventions of another field.

Researcher Identity and Attribution

Multidisciplinary projects often involve large teams with members from different departments or institutions. The ORCID for Researchers service provides a persistent identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers with similar names. This identifier is especially important in multidisciplinary work because your publications may appear in journals from many different fields.

Set up your ORCID record before you submit. Link it to your institutional affiliation and your previous publications. Include your ORCID identifier in your submission so that your work is correctly attributed across all the fields your manuscript touches.

Professional Escalation Criteria

When to Seek Advice from Senior Colleagues

If you have received two or more desk rejections for the same manuscript, seek advice from a senior colleague who has published multidisciplinary work. They may know journals that you have not considered. They may also identify problems in your manuscript that are causing the rejections.

A senior colleague can also help you interpret rejection letters. Some rejection letters contain coded messages about the manuscript's fit or quality. A colleague who has served as an editor can decode these messages and tell you whether revision will help or whether you should submit elsewhere.

When to Consult the Journal Directly

If you receive conflicting signals about a journal's interest in your work, contact the editorial office directly. Ask whether your manuscript is under consideration and what the expected timeline is. Ask whether the editor has identified reviewers and what fields those reviewers represent.

This direct contact is appropriate when you have a legitimate concern about the handling of your submission. It is not appropriate to contact the editor repeatedly or to demand information that the journal does not normally provide. Use your judgment about when a follow-up is warranted.

When to Consider a Different Publication Strategy

If your manuscript continues to receive rejections despite good reviews, consider whether a journal is the right venue. Some multidisciplinary work is better suited to a book chapter, a conference proceedings volume, or a preprint server followed by a shorter journal article.

The Committee on Publication Ethics Core Practices describe the responsibilities of authors, reviewers, and editors. These practices include honest reporting of your work and respect for the peer review process. If you decide to change your publication strategy, do so transparently and do not submit the same manuscript to multiple venues simultaneously.

Limitations of Journal Selection Criteria

The Criteria Cannot Predict Review Outcomes

The screening criteria in this article help you identify journals with the infrastructure to evaluate multidisciplinary work. They cannot predict whether your specific manuscript will receive favorable reviews. A journal with excellent interdisciplinary capacity may still reject your work because the reviewers find methodological problems or insufficient novelty.

Treat the criteria as a filter, not a guarantee. They reduce the probability of a scope mismatch rejection. They do not eliminate the normal risks of peer review.

Journal Scope Changes Over Time

A journal that published interdisciplinary work five years ago may have narrowed its scope. A journal that was single-discipline may have expanded. Editorial board changes, publisher decisions, and market pressures all affect journal scope.

Check the journal's recent issues instead of relying on its historical reputation. A journal that has not published interdisciplinary work in the past two years may no longer have the capacity to evaluate it, regardless of what its scope statement says.

The Criteria Are Field-Specific

The specific criteria that matter for your manuscript depend on the fields you are combining. A manuscript combining animal science and economics needs different editorial expertise than a manuscript combining veterinary medicine and computer science. Apply the general principles in this article to your specific combination of fields.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if a journal genuinely accepts multidisciplinary work?

Examine the editorial board for members from each field your manuscript spans, review the last two years of published articles for cross-field citations and author affiliations, and read the scope statement for explicit language about interdisciplinary work. A journal that publishes work like yours regularly is the most reliable signal.

What should I include in a presubmission inquiry?

Describe your manuscript's topic, methods, and the fields it spans. Include your abstract and ask whether the journal can evaluate work of this type. Mention any editors on the board whose expertise matches your manuscript. Keep the inquiry brief and professional.

How many journals should I have on my candidate list?

Build a list of at least five to ten candidates before you submit. Multidisciplinary manuscripts often require multiple submissions, and having a prepared list prevents rushed decisions after a rejection. Screen each candidate against your criteria before adding it to the list.

Should I mention the multidisciplinary nature of my work in my cover letter?

Yes. Explain which fields your manuscript connects and why that connection is valuable. Identify the editors or reviewers who might be appropriate for your work. This information helps the editor assign your manuscript to someone who can evaluate it fairly.

How do reporting guidelines help with multidisciplinary manuscripts?

Reporting guidelines from the EQUATOR Network tell you what information to include in your methods and results so that reviewers can assess your work. For multidisciplinary manuscripts, these guidelines help you explain your methods clearly to reviewers who may not be familiar with your primary field.

What should I do if reviewers from different fields give conflicting feedback?

Categorize the feedback by field and assess which concerns are substantive. A methods concern from a reviewer in the field where the method originated deserves more weight than a methods concern from a reviewer in a distant field. Address substantive concerns in your revision and explain your reasoning in your response letter.

How long should I wait before following up on my submission?

Follow the journal's stated timeline for review. If the journal does not provide a timeline, wait at least two to three months before contacting the editorial office. Multidisciplinary manuscripts may take longer because the editor needs to find reviewers from multiple fields.

What are the ethical rules for submitting to multiple journals?

The Committee on Publication Ethics Core Practices describe the expectation that you submit your manuscript to only one journal at a time. Submitting the same manuscript to multiple journals simultaneously is considered misconduct. Withdraw your manuscript from one journal before submitting it to another.

Using the Evidence

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• Ethical Standards in Research: What They Are and Why They Matter
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• Bioinformatics Portfolio: Projects That Demonstrate Real Research Judgment
• Bioinformatics PhD Applications: Planning the Research Fit Process

References and Further Reading

• Research Methods Resources. National Library of Medicine.
• EQUATOR Network. EQUATOR Network.
• Core Practices. Committee on Publication Ethics.
• NIH Grants and Funding. National Institutes of Health.
• ORCID for Researchers. ORCID.
• Data Management and Sharing Policy. National Institutes of Health.
• NCBI Literature Resources. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
• PubMed. National Library of Medicine.

This article is educational and does not replace institutional policy, professional advice, or applicable safety and regulatory requirements.