What should I do if wrongfully approved a manuscript while references were incorrect?

Question

I submitted a manuscript to a Springer journal four days ago. After the system built PDF of the manuscript from the latex and image files, I checked the images but due to my tiredness, I forgot to check references of the manuscript. Unfortunately, I approved the submission upon request of the system. After that I checked and discovered the manuscript reference numbers are substituted with question marks and their system didn't correctly recognize my references from the Latex file.

I emailed the Springer contact information which is available in the menu of their system, but even though I emailed two times requesting for help with this manuscript, they didn't respond. The state of the paper in the system is "pending editor assignment."

What should I do?

1. Email to Editor-in-Chief of the journal and ask what to do?

2. Wait and see what will happen? Unfortunately, I am in a hurry to have an answer from a journal because of my university administrative issues. One of the reasons I submitted to this particular journal is its fast average submission to first decision among JCR journals in my field.

Answer 1

Email the journal. This is something the publisher should be able to easily solve, since it's simply returning the paper to the author. Worst case scenario, the publisher can return a 'revise' decision and let you fix the problem.

It sounds like you've already done this and didn't receive a response for four days. This isn't particularly long - for example, perhaps the desk editor is on short-term leave and Springer didn't assign someone to cover. I would wait a bit. If you're in a rush you can also email the editor-in-chief; however, you write that the status is "pending editor assignment", which could mean that the editor-in-chief has not seen the paper yet.