When the Editor-in-Chief accepts a proposed research article, integrative literature review, case study, tutorial, or teaching case for formal consideration, the Editor-in-Chief sends the article for a double-blind peer-review.
A peer review involves an expert in the specialty of the article or a representative of the general readership of the journal reading the proposed article and providing a publishing recommendation on it. The Editor-in-Chief uses these recommendations to make a publishing decision.
A double-blind peer review process is one in which neither the authors nor the reviewers know one anothers’ identity.
Note that we do not conduct peer reviews for book reviews.
The following graphic identifies the steps in our peer-review process, which takes between 12 and 18 weeks (longer if we have difficulty finding appropriate reviewers). Each step is then described in greater detail below.
1. Receive submissions
The Editor-in-chief receives submissions and determines whether to forward them for peer review.
Submissions that cover one of our preferred topics and follow one of our five required structures are forwarded for peer review.
2. Log in submissions
We acknowledge your submission, log your article into our database, and create a blind version for review.
3. Find Reviewers
We identify as many as four reviewers whose expertise fits the subject of the article and send them the abstract. Because of scheduling conflicts, we may contact as many as eight potential reviewers to receive a full review.
4. Send article for review
After a reviewer agrees to review the article, we send them a blind copy of the article with one of our review forms. To provide consistent, detailed and high quality feedback to our editors and authors, our peer reviewers use these standard review forms: Research Reports and Integrative Literature Reviews | Case Studies | Tutorials | Teaching Cases
5. Receive reviews
When reviewers complete their reviews, they send us a completed review form with a publishing recommendation.
6. Make a publishing decision
Based on the recommendations of the reviewers, the Editor-in-Chief determines required revisions, and makes one of these publishing decisions:
- Publish as is
- Publish with minor changes (the paper is accepted on the condition that you complete a list of required revisions)
- Revise and resubmit for consideration(we invite you to revise the paper according to the reviewers’ feedback and resubmit it for another blind review)
- Reject(we will not accept your article, and revisions will not address our concerns)
7. Send decision letter
The Editor-in-Chief sends you a letter with our publishing decision, a list of required revisions, and copies of the blind peer reviews.
8. Revisions by author(s)
If your article is accepted as-is or with minor changes, you may revise the article and submit the final version to the Editor-in-Chief, who will check whether you have made the required revisions listed in the decision letter.
9. Transfer Copyright
When your article is fully accepted, we send you the IEEE copyright transfer form to sign and return to us by email. We also notify you at that time about options for publishing your article as Open Access.
10. Prepare the article for production
We prepare your tables, copyedit your text and typeset the article. NOTE: you can speed the process by following our required formatting guidelines.
11. Publish the article
We publish the completed copyedited and typeset article.
We first publish most articles electronically in the Early Access section of our website. The date of publication in Early Access is the official publication date.
When space becomes available in the print journal, we will also publish the article there. We are a quarterly journal but we only print twice a year with two issues in each printing.