The Refereeing Process

Step one: the invitation email. You will be sent an email asking you to referee the paper. This will contain an abstract of the work, but not a copy of the actual manuscript. If the paper is in your area, and you have time to review it, please click the link to accept the invitation. You will be assigned a personal deadline, usually five weeks from the day that you accepted.

If you do not have time to referee the manuscript, please decline using the online link. The automated system then registers your inability to referee the manuscript, and you will not be sent any further reminder emails. If you hit reply and email the editorial office instead, it may take a few days before we are able to process your request. In the meantime, you will continue to be sent automatic reminders about the invitation.

The senior editors read every paper thoroughly before asking referees to comment, and only a proportion of papers make it to this stage. We only send out work that we feel is both appropriate for the journal in terms of subject matter, and is worthy of the time of referees.

Step two: the manuscript

On acceptance, you will be sent a link to view a copy of the full manuscript. Please click this and enter our Manuscript Central site. While you are on the website, you might want to tell us a little more about your latest research by filling in the brief ‘personal details’ section.

Please be aware that we operate a system of double blind refereeing. This means that you will not be told the identity of the author, and that the author will likewise receive your comments anonymously. This is the highest standard of academic refereeing, and we employ it to ensure that personal politics do not interfere with the fairness and transparency of the refereeing process.

Sometimes in a small field like planning, individuals guess the identity of a paper’s author having heard papers at conferences or having read previous items by the same person. Some feel that they are still able to provide a fair assessment of the paper’s merits, but others feel that they are too close to the author to be independent. We do not confirm or deny such suspicions, but if you want advice in these circumstances, please email the journal manager, Ellie Phillips journalmanagerptp@gmail.com

Step three: writing your comments

We subedit all papers that we publish at a later date, so there is no need for referees to undertake this task. Instead, you are asked to assess the article in terms of its readiness for publication, and to provide constructive criticism about how to improve it. At the end of this section, you will find a number of questions that may help you to write your comments.

You are asked to provide comments on a standard form.

To begin, you are asked to give a general verdict on the paper. There are five options to choose from:

Accept without corrections

This is rarely used! However, sometimes referees feel that a paper is of such high quality that it can be accepted by the journal without any alteration, and choose this option.

Accept with minor corrections

Also a rare outcome, achieved by only the most polished papers. Minor corrections are defined as small tweaks and attention to matters of detail (e.g. adding a paragraph here or there to explain something in more depth). Authors are expected to be able to achieve minor revisions in around 2 months.

Accept with major corrections AND Revise and resubmit

The line between ‘major corrections’ and ‘revise and resubmit’ is blurred. Both options require the author to undertake some fairly major structural and substantive work on the paper – which means setting aside several days for careful thinking and reworking. ‘Revise and resubmit’ indicates that a more comprehensive rewrite is necessary. We allow authors 6 months to complete major corrections.

Reject

If you decide that an article is unpublishable, this option is appropriate.

After you have given your overall impression, you can provide more detailed comments using the two boxes further down the form. One is for comments to the editors, the other is for comments to the author. Comments that you send to the editors are NOT shared with the author, and you should use this box only if you have something confidential to say that you do not want to share with the paper’s writer. Comments to the author are sent on to the paper’s writer, but they will be anonymized so your identity will not be known.

Step 4: Submitting your comments

You can save your comments at any point as you write. Alternatively, many authors like to produce their comments using Word, then cut and paste them into the appropriate box on the official form.

Please press ‘Submit’ when you are ready to send the final draft to us. You will receive an email confirming receipt and expressing our gratitude for your time and effort.