Thank you for submitting your research article to AIJR Journals. This is a quick guide for the author; what to expect next, after the submission. The author can find approximate reviewing time under the author’s guidelines of the journal. Regardless of the journal where you had submitted the paper, the article will go through following process to reach a final decision-
1. Initial Editorial Screening
This is the very first step for the Initial quality screening of the article during the editorial workflow. Normally Editorial screening completes within one week of submission and during this stage, you will see article status as “Submission”. For more detail visit the Editorial Screening Process. The author shall frequently check email during this phase for any pre-review discussion notification or log in to the author dashboard as sometimes email could not be delivered. In case any discussion initiated by the Managing Editor, the author shall respond immediately. If the manuscript found suitable during editorial screening process editorial workflow will move on to the next step of handling editor/section editor assignment.
2. Section Editor Assignment
If managing editor finds manuscript suitable for consideration, handling editor/section editor will be assigned to proceed further to look through the editorial workflow. Normally it takes 2-3 days and the submission status will be changed to “Review”. This step is for editors only, authors don’t need to do anything.
The assigned editor will go through the manuscript for second preliminary content quality screening and If the editor finds that the article is unsuitable, the article will go back to the author with a decline email that may or may not include suggestions for major changes.
However, If the editor finds the article suitable for the journal, and is of considerable quality, the article will move on to the next step of Peer-Reviewing Process. The submission status will remain as “Review” with a message “Waiting for reviewers to be assigned”.
3. Peer-Reviewing
This is a crucial and most important step of the editorial workflow for scholarly journals, visit the paper publishing process for an overview. The handling editor will invite suitable reviewers for critique on the quality & relevance of the article. The manuscript status will remain “Review” with the message “Awaiting responses from reviewers” However, sometimes reviewers choose to send feedback through email instead of the online editorial management system, if so, the message will remain “Waiting for reviewers to be assigned”. Reviewing process takes couple of weeks as per the selected reviewing option described in the author guidelines of the journal. Usually, the author doesn’t need to do anything at this step, the author shall relax and wait for the next step of “Decision”.
4. Decision
After the reviewers send their feedbacks, the handling editor/section editor will make a recommendation to the journal editor/managing editor based on received comments and their own evaluation. The status message of the submission will be changed to “All reviews are in and a decision is needed“. The editor/managing editor will look at the recommendation from the section editor and send the reviewing report with one of the following decisions-
- Accept Submission (its rare)
- Revisions Required (Or Minor Revisions Required)
- Decline
If the decision is Revisions Required, the submission status message will be changed to “Revisions have been requested”. The author shall look at the comments carefully and revise the manuscript by addressing each and every comment seriously.
After revising the manuscript within a given timeline (usually 15 days), upload the revised manuscript under the same submission (do not submit it as new submission otherwise it will be considered as author misconduct of duplicate submission), the author may watch this YouTube tutorial for revision submissions. After the successful upload, the status message will be changed to “Revisions have been submitted” and the author needs to wait for the next decision notification from the editor. Revised manuscript may again undergo the peer-review process with new reviewers or with the same reviewers to ensure that the revisions are satisfactory. The same process of peer-reviewing and decision will be repeated as per the described timeline under author guidelines.
Note to the Authors
Authors shall keep patience and wait for the notification from the editor as per selected reviewing option & described timelines of the journal’s author guidelines. These workflows are supposed to continue smoothly and hence author shall not try to send unnecessary emails to the journal for manuscript status unless the described timeline already passed.
Authors are suggested to check the author dashboard sometimes (maybe every 15 days); in case of any notification under the discussion board (also in the task) from the editor as sometimes the email ends up in the spam and the author could not aware of it. To avoid ending up emails in the spam authors may subscribe to the mailing list of the journal by clicking here which will ensure optimal trusted delivery of the emails sent through the editorial workflow.
