Claire Hansell, senior editor
There are 29 manuscript editors at Nature, split into two teams: physical sciences (10.5 editors) and life sciences (18.5 editors); no arguments over who got the best half of Bryden Le Bailly, the editor who has a foot in both camps, of course. Every manuscript editor has their own ‘specialist subject(s)’ and was, once upon a time, a practising research scientist.

Our ultimate goal is to publish the most exciting and important research papers and reviews in the pages of Nature, and to do that we need to solicit and assess submissions, arrange peer review of manuscripts and decide what makes it through to publication and what doesn’t.

A day in the life of a manuscript editor, like that of all our colleagues at Nature, is a busy one, and could probably be summarised thus: read papers, write e-mails, have meetings, or some combination thereof. But that wouldn’t make for a very informative or interesting blog post. So, instead, we have created a ‘choose-your-own adventure’, manuscript-editor style.

It’s impossible, in this format, to cover absolutely everything we do and the subtleties of choices we sometimes make, but we nonetheless hope that our efforts will convey — in a fun way — some of the tasks that an editor could be doing, and some of the excitement, rewards, trials and tribulations that come with the job!

To start your adventure click here.