INTRODUCTION: scientific journals play a crucial role in the dissemination and validation of scientific knowledge, and editorial management ranges from conceptualization to post-publication of content. Artificial intelligence (AI) has had a great impact on scientific communication and editorial management of scientific journals. AI can offer solutions and benefits for editorial management, but it also poses technical, economic, social and ethical challenges that should be considered and approached with caution and responsibility. OBJECTIVE: to describe the benefits and limitations of the use of AI in the editorial management of scientific journals through a systematic literature review. METHOD: a systematic literature review was conducted based on the PRISMA methodology. An information search was carried out in different bibliographic database systems, indexing systems and search engines, and inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to the identified studies. RESULTS: the information search allowed retrieving a total of 2750 sources, of which 10 articles that met the stated criteria were included. Benefits such as the facilitation of writing, translation, review and editing tasks were identified, as well as limitations related to ethical issues, bias, errors and plagiarism generated by AI. CONCLUSIONS: While AI can streamline the production and analysis of information distribution, it also poses challenges in terms of reliability, ethics and authenticity of published content. It requires the critical involvement of human intelligence for proper exploitation.