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Table of Contents
Sending a Manuscript for Review, Inviting Reviewers, and Collecting Reviews
Making an Initial Decision and Requesting Revisions
Editor Tips
- Check your spam folder for automated emails from the journal system including: invitations to manage submissions, communication from authors, and communication from other journal staff.
- When inviting reviewers, be conscious of how many concurrent reviews a reviewer has as well as the last time a reviewer completed a review. Please avoid abusing reviewers! Students should not have more than 1-2 papers to review at a time and should not be reviewing more than 2 papers per quarter.
- Don't be afraid to invite external reviewers. Once someone has been added to the journal system, it becomes much easier to invite them to review papers in the future. Growing our list of reviewers is important!
- Be mindful of our journal goals - we want to support young/early career researchers. In practice, this means giving authors more feedback/help than may be normal at larger journals.
- Reach out to the editors-in-chief with any suggestions you may have!
- Review the the full policies of the journal by reading the Intermountain Journal of Translational Medicine Bylaws, which can be accessed here.
General Workflow
This section outlines the most common tasks which you will need to complete as an editor. For detailed information and video tutorials covering the editorial workflow please see the OJS Documentation. You can also watch this series of videos.
Accessing New Submissions
New submissions are assigned based on expertise and availability by the editors-in-chief. When you are assigned a new submission, you will receive an automated email informing you. If you are unable to manage a submission for any reason please reach out to an editor-in-chief as soon as possible. To access the submission, log in to the journal website and navigate to your Dashboard. Once there, you will see active submissions listed in your Queue.
Click "View" to view the submission.
From here you will see the manuscript files uploaded by the authors. At a minimum, there should be a cover/title page and an anonymized manuscript. You can download any of the files by clicking on the file names.
Assessing a New Submission
Once you have accessed your assigned submission and downloaded the necessary files, you can begin to assess the paper for suitability. At this stage you are ONLY deciding whether the manuscript should be sent for review. Therefore, this is a brief assessment and not an in-depth review. With that in mind, you should be asking several questions as you read the manuscript.
1. Does the paper fit in the scope of the journal? Does it fall into an accepted article type?
2. Is the writing of sufficient quality to send to reviewers?
3. Do the conclusions make sense based on the methodology and results presented?
If a manuscript fails to meet any of these screening criteria, considering an editorial rejection without review.
Remember that our goal is to publish scientifically valid research, you should not reject at paper at this stage for lack of perceived impact. A paper should only be rejected at this stage if it has obvious, significant flaws that cannot be addressed in the peer review process. If you feel results are not novel, but are otherwise sound, please reach out to one of our editors-in-chief.
You should also reach out to authors to correct major formatting issues including missing or improperly formatted citations before sending the paper for review. It may be helpful to familiarize yourself with the formatting requirements of the journal, which can be found here.
Sending a Manuscript for Review, Inviting Reviewers, and Collecting Reviews
If you decide to send a manuscript for review, simply select "Send to Review" in your workflow. At this point, you will be prompted to select which files will be passed on to the next stage. Only send anonymous (ie without author information) documents on to review. Please be sure to verify that files marked in the system as "anonymous" are, in fact, anonymous. Our double-blind peer review process relies on our editors ensuring that author identities are not inadvertently leaked to reviewers.
Once you are in the review tab of your workflow, you can assign reviewers. You can only invite individuals who have a journal account and are marked as reviewers to review a manuscript. Each manuscript should be reviewed by at least two reviewers. You may choose to select two from the current list of reviewers or you may choose to invite individuals who are not yet in the journal system. This may be necessary if the paper requires special expertise, or if additional reviewers are required. You must reach out to these potential reviewers individually. An email template has been provided in the Links and Documents section of this page. Remember, if an external reviewer agrees, they must make an account and you must add them as a reviewer before they will be able to see the article. Additionally, two templates are available for you to assign to reviewers 1) a free-form template suitable for experienced reviewers and 2) a structured checklist-based template suitable for student reviewers. You may assign reviewers whichever you prefer.
When you invite reviewers, default deadlines for accepting the review will populate. You may change these as you see fit, or leave them be. Whatever you do, it is your responsibility to ensure that reviews are received in a timely fashion. Our goal is for authors to receive reviews within ~45 days of submission. If reviewers are not responding or completing their reviews within a reasonable timeframe, you will need to invite additional reviewers.
Making an Initial Decision and Requesting Revisions
Once you receive at least two reviews, you may make an initial decision. Depending on your individual editorial privileges, you may make a decision yourself or recommend a decision to a more senior editor. This is the time to review our publication criteria. A paper at this point does not need to meet those publication criteria completely. Instead, it must have the potential to meet those criteria. In other words, ask yourself if the problems identified by the reviewers be fixed with one or more rounds of revision. If you feel they can be, then you should request revisions in the workflow.
When requesting revisions, you may indicate whether or not the paper will be reviewed again. Usually, a manuscript should be re-reviewed. However, there are circumstances in which you may be able to assess revisions yourself without additional input from the reviewers. You may decide this at your discretion.
A paper may require several rounds of revisions. IMJTM does not impose a limit to the number of review/revision rounds that may take place. However, more than three rounds of review is taxing on the system and our reviewers and, if it becomes clear that multiple additional rounds of revisions will be required, you should reject the paper with an offer to resubmit a significantly revised manuscript.
Accepting a Manuscript
Once you decide to accept a manuscript (alone or in conjunction with a senior editor) your job is done! The paper will be handed off to another individual for copyediting and publication.