Physiology Journal Weekly Formatting and Submission Guide
I got dragged into helping a grad student fix their submission last month because they kept getting desk-rejected for format violations that had nothing to do with their actual data. Here's what I learned that isn't in the author guidelines. Physiology Journal Weekly is a peer-reviewed publication covering experimental physiology, systems biology, and mechanistic studies. It publishes fairly quickly compared to traditional physiology journals — typical turnaround from submission to first decision is about 6 to 8 weeks. That speed comes from a rolling submission model, which means the editorial team is always processing manuscripts rather than waiting for quarterly issues. This affects how you plan your own timeline if your work has a dependency on publication for a thesis defense or grant deadline. The blind peer review process requires a separate title page file and a completely anonymized manuscript file. The catch is that supplementary materials are NOT blind-reviewed in the same way. If you include a link to a GitHub repo with your analysis code in the supplementary, that link is visible to reviewers before they see the main text. I've seen two manuscripts get flagged for methodological concerns at the review stage solely because the code repository revealed a preprocessing step that the methods section downplayed. The workaround is simple: scrub all supplementary files of any identifiers, including project names in code comments. I made my postdoc run a grep across every supplementary file before submission once. Took ten minutes. Saved us from a very awkward revision round.
Another thing: the journal uses a two-pass citation format. In-text citations are numbered sequentially in the order they appear, but the reference list must be formatted in a specific variant of Vancouver style with journal abbreviations drawn from NLM Catalog. If you import references from EndNote using the default Vancouver output, they'll likely have incorrect journal abbreviations. I use a script that cross-references the DOI against NLM before submission to catch these. It runs in about three minutes and typically corrects 12 to 18 entries in a 60-reference manuscript.
Common structural problems
The most frequent reason for major revision requests involves the statistical methods section. Physiology Journal Weekly expects explicit justification for sample sizes and clear statements about whether data meet parametric assumptions. I've reviewed enough submissions to know that approximately 40 percent of early-career authors skip the normality test description entirely and just report mean ± SEM without stating whether they verified distribution. They also tend to underreport exclusion criteria. If you removed outliers, state the threshold and the number removed. Reviewers will ask, and if you didn't include it upfront, the revision adds at least a week to your timeline. Figure formatting is another minefield. The journal requires figures in TIFF format at 300 dpi minimum for photographs and 1200 dpi for line art. Vector-based figures should be submitted as EPS or PDF. I've lost count of how many authors submit PNG exports from GraphPad Prism and then get rejected on the first technical check. The conversion step usually adds a day of delay. Learn how to export directly to TIFF from your graphing software or use ImageJ for batch conversion. It's not complicated, but it's tedious and easy to forget.
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What I wish I'd known before submitting
The journal has a strong preference for mechanistic over descriptive studies. If your paper shows that treatment X changed parameter Y without explaining the underlying pathway, expect reviewers to push hard for additional experiments or a major reframing. I had a colleague whose paper on cardiac electrophysiology was initially received as a routine measurement study. After revisions, the editor suggested reframing around ion channel gating kinetics, which actually strengthened the paper but required an additional patch-clamp dataset. That added about six weeks of bench time. Worth it in the end, but not something you plan for preemptively. There's also a data availability policy that has tripped up several researchers I know. Physiology Journal Weekly requires raw data to be deposited in a recognized repository before acceptance. The acceptable repositories include Zenodo, Figshare, or discipline-specific databases. The detail people miss is that the data access statement must include a direct DOI or persistent link, not just a repository name. If you upload to Zenodo after submission but before acceptance, you might get away with it, but there's no guarantee. Upload during the revision stage at the latest, and generate the DOI before the final proofing round. The open access option costs around $2,500 USD as of the current fee schedule. If you're funding this through a grant, check whether your institution has a transformative agreement with the publisher. Several European universities and a growing number of US institutions have negotiated APC coverage that eliminates the fee entirely for corresponding authors from those institutions. Verify this before you budget for it. I knew a lab that paid the full APC and then found out two months later that their university had just signed an agreement covering exactly their case.
If your work is more applied or clinical in nature, you might also consider whether Physiology Journal Weekly is the right fit. The journal skews toward basic and translational research. Applied clinical physiology papers tend to do better in journals like Clinical Physiology and Functional Imaging or American Journal of Physiology - Regulatory Integrative and Comparative Physiology. Using the wrong journal adds months to your publication timeline because you'll get desk-rejected and then start over with a different format and review process. I've watched that happen twice in a single semester.
