All submitted manuscripts will be undergoing initial screening process to see the originality of the work as well as relevance and contribution. To save time for authors and peer-reviewers, only those papers that seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria will be sent for formal review. Those papers judged by the editors to be of insufficient general interest or otherwise inappropriate will be rejected promptly without external review (although these decisions may be based on informal advice from specialists in the field).
Manuscripts judged to be of potential interest to our readership will be forwarded to formal review, typically to two reviewers, but sometimes more if special advice is needed (for example on statistics or a particular technique). The editors then make a decision based on the reviewers’ advice, from among several possibilities:
- Accept, with or without editorial revisions.
- Invite the authors to revise their manuscripts to address specific concerns before a final decision is reached.
- Reject, but indicate to the authors that further work might justify a resubmission
- Reject outright, typically on grounds of specialist interest, lack of novelty, insufficient conceptual advance or major technical and/ or interpretational problems.