A journal lives and dies not just by the people that submit to it, but the reviewers who read the papers and determine if they’re fit for the journal.
I’m going to talk about the review process in this blog post. It’s a great way to contribute to a journal and to the field. It sounds intimidating though, so I hope this demystifies it a bit.
First, this isn’t like in school where you submitted a paper, someone marked it up with a red pen, and handed it back. I know why teachers use red pens (it’s easier to read) but seeing my paper covered with red ink was never a happy thing.
Instead, this is you reading the paper and giving us your opinion on it. There’s no right or wrong here, it’s your opinion. This isn’t a school essay you’re grading, this is most definitely your opinion. I think I said ‘your opinion’ three times in this paragraph, well, four if you count this sentence, but I want to reiterate that. You can’t get this wrong.
In most journals, you read the paper, you answer some questions about the paper, and then you have to make a choice about what you think should be done with the paper. I’m going to talk about the four options you have.
- Reject: This doesn’t mean the paper is bad. It can mean that the paper doesn’t fit the journal. For a journal on digital threats, a paper about paper airplanes is a bad fit and shouldn’t be accepted. It could also mean that there’s nothing novel in the paper. For example, if the paper proposes a method to filter traffic at the network level but sounds suspiciously like a firewall, then that’s not a new method. That’s an old method someone is trying to publish. What you’re really saying about the paper is there are problems in the paper that can’t be fixed.
- Major Revisions: In this case, you’re saying that you like the outcome of the paper but there’s major problems with the methods or data that they used. You think that those problems can be fixed and you want to give the authors a chance to fix them.
- Minor Revision: In this case there’s small problems. You want the author (or authors) to create the best paper they can and you’ve found a few things that should be fixed. Maybe the graph is labelled incorrectly. Maybe they’re missing a step in their method. The results are good, it’s just… the little things.
- Accept: Paper is perfect, you can’t think of a single thing to do to fix it.
You’re also not the final decision on the paper. Just because you think a paper should be accepted or rejected doesn’t mean that’s what is going to happen. Three reviews are required for every paper. It’s not just you making that decision.
The Associate Editor (AE) in charge of the paper will take your review and the other two reviewers’ reviews into consideration before making their decision. They don’t just read your recommendation ‘Reject!’ and do that, they read what you’ve written to the author. Then they make a recommendation.
It’s actually the Editors-in-Chief who make that final decision. But we couldn’t do it without your opinion on the paper.