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Before few days I've submitted my first paper , it is a review article about Dirac monopole. After 2 days the arxiv moderation put it in hold and then after few hours they send me this mail.

arXiv is intended as a forum for professional members of the scientific community to communicate their formal research results. Please provide the following information:

  1. Do you have a conventional publication record? In what field? Please provide us with a current list of publications.

  2. What is the precise nature of your institutional affiliation?

I'm an undergraduate student , I have complete my thesis this month and I've not published anything before so I tell them this and tell them also about my university which is well-established and many of my professors and postgraduate students have a publications and many of them used to put almost all of their papers on arxiv. They did not response and I don't know why all of this happened. So can anyone had a similar problem like this tell me what is the problem with my submission and if it is suitable for arxiv ?

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    You should write the moderators precisely what you have told us, and politely ask if there was a specific reason for putting the article on hold.
    – lighthouse keeper
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 6:31
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    My guess would be that part of the issue is that this is a review article, so it potentially does not contain any original research. As such, it only belongs on the arXiv if it has been written by someone with a very good and broad understanding of the topic, hence the question about your research record.
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 8:32
  • @lighthousekeeper this is what I told them but until now (3 days) there is no answer and I don't know if this mean something or just it is the time and they did not see the message and decide yet.
    – Mohamed IBrahim
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 9:58
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    @Walter The arXiv is primarily a preprint server, so usually one uploads to arXiv just prior to submitting to a journal, though it is also common to wait for a while. While the last parenthetical remark might be true, the sentence before it is absolutely false. A DOI is never necessary for something to be citable.
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 17:04
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    @Walter The arXiv identifier is in pretty much every way superior to a DOI so that part of the argument does not hold. Also, as you now clarify, you could in fact cite it, they just will not force you to (here we start to move into field specific stuff because I am fairly certain most math journals would not accept a missing reference just because the source was arXiv).
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented Jun 30, 2017 at 7:44

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ArXiv is clear in its mission statement: it wants to be an archive and distribution system for research articles. They only accept submissions from registered authors, and have an entire machinery in place to safeguard the scientific quality of the papers they distribute. For example, they require first time submitters to be endorsed (see the information about endorsment here).

If you are an established researcher in the field, the endorsment happens automatically. But since you're an undergraduate student, they will require that you either prove your expertise in the field, or that you send an endorsment letter by someone who is known as an expert in that field. On the webpage about endorsment they give you the information on how to obtain an endorsment, but they also state:

A good choice for graduate students would be your thesis advisor or another professor in your department/institution working in your field.

As you're an undergraduate student, I doubt anyone will endorse you as being an expert in that field, especially since we're talking about a review. At our faculty, you don't start writing reviews before the end of your PhD.

So in all honesty, I'm afraid you're aiming too high for the time being. The mail itself doesn't necessarily mean they reject your paper, but without proper endorsment they won't accept you as an expert in the field.

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    I am not entirely sure this is correct. Usually the endorsement is for people who do not have an academic affilitation (without an affiliation and without endorsement, you don't even get to the step where you submit the paper). It seems that the OP has had an automatic endorsement through having a university email (at least this is my guess). So in some sense they have already passed the usual point at which an endorsement would be required.
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 9:18
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    @MohamedIBrahim if you would be as kind to register the "In most cases" before that sentence, and read the next paragraph as well: "During the submission process, however, we may require authors who are submitting papers to a subject category for the first time to get an endorsement from an established arXiv author." They're gathering information in order to endorse you for submission to that field. And you can argue with me all you want, this is how arXiv works for over 10 years now and I didn't make these rules.
    – Joris Meys
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 11:01
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    @MohamedIBrahim I personally would advise my students to not try to publish a review before they published at least 3-4 research articles about that topic. So if you were my student, I'd tell you withdraw the review and to focus on doing actual research and reporting on that instead. But this is strictly my personal opinion on matters. If you want to proceed with the review, I'd try to find an arxiv author at your university and ask for his/her opinion with an open mind. And if the answer is "don't do this", take it and move on. You've still got an entire carreer ahead of you.
    – Joris Meys
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 11:10
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    PS: I don't mean this in a rude way, although people have told me I can appear rather rude at times. I just want to help you out in choosing what's the best investment of your time.
    – Joris Meys
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 11:11
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    @MohamedIBrahim I am agreeing more and more with Joris now. I think the phrasing in the message is such that if you happen to be an established researcher in your field but just haven't been using arXiv so far, they will accept your paper without you having to find an endorser (so if you could either point to a solid record of publications or to the fact that you are a full professor at your institution that would probably suffice). Since this is not the case, most likely they will follow up with a request that you find an endorser once they get around to it (everything takes time).
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 11:56

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