求问各位，投稿中、接收中的论文用英文怎么表述呢？常见的有in press, forthcoming, under contract等等，这些用法有什么区别呢，有没有比较权威的解释？

以下是我在网上搜到的一段话，个人观点。

"I'm pretty sure there's nothing official about my usage, but I've been doing it for many years and can't remember where, when, or how I learned it:

Under contract = has been accepted once you make the revisions required by readers and fix up the footnotes in the right style (or whatever); you've signed a contract that has a delivery date, but you haven't yet delivered the final manuscript. This applies to books only.

Forthcoming = final manuscript has been accepted, and the publication process has begun. At this point, you should be given a tentative date. For a book, then, it's "Forthcoming, Whatever Press, 2007" and for an article, if no date has been given to you yet, it's "Forthcoming, Journal" (though the article I just had accepted gave me volume, month, and date with the first proofs).

"In Press," technically, also applies only to books and means the copy-editing has been done, you've approved all the changes, and the editor has informed you that it has "gone to press." This meant a lot more back in the days when publishers actually had to set type, so there was the stage when you've returned the copy-edited manuscript with your OK, the stage when you had proofread and returned the final galleys, and the stage when you got page proofs. "In Press" in those days meant you'd returned the final galleys, or so I believed: you had no more real input into the process except for catching any printers' errors in the page proofs, and the time to publication was really dependable.

Personally, I use "Forthcoming" with the tentative date for both books and articles once the final manuscript has been accepted -- but our university's provost requires that books which are to be counted towards a promotion or a merit award be "In Press" so we all switch the language when sending up a file for such a purpose. If there are not actual page proofs to send with the file, the provost will turn it back.

So, having thought with my fingers here, I'd say that in such documents you need to find out what the local rules are -- but that otherwise "Under Contract" before the final manuscript has been delivered and "Forthcoming" once it has been received and approved."