A guide to publishing in Biofilm: how to avoid a desk rejection

Abstract

The biofilm field is booming. Metrics produced by PubMed show the first manuscript referencing ‘biofilm’ was published in 1975 in Microbial Ecology [1], and from 2005 onwards the publication numbers have been in the thousands, with 9,486 papers published just in 2024. The field has also widened in scope and currently encompasses most, if not all, subdisciplines of microbiology as well as many in engineering. Large multidisciplinary centers focused on biofilm research have been established worldwide, including the Center for Biofilm Engineering in the US (celebrating its 35th anniversary of biofilm research in 2025) [2], the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (established in 2011), the Costerton Biofilm Center in Copenhagen (Denmark, established in 2015) and the National Biofilms Innovation Centre in the UK (launched in 2018). Biofilm research has become truly global, as is also evidenced by the increasing number of large international biofilm-related conferences taking place in different continents (including Eurobiofilms and the Biofilm 1–11 conference series in Europe, the ASM Biofilm conference in the US, and the Asia-Pacific Biofilm conferences in China). Several international initiatives were taken in recent years to discuss bottlenecks in biofilm research and identify priority questions to guide research and policy making [3,4]. In addition, standardized methods are increasingly being developed and used, showing that the field has been accepted, integrated and matured [[5], [6], [7]]. Collectively these points suggest the biofilm field is thriving.