Upon submission, your article will be reviewed by the editorial staff to ensure that the submission is complete, sufficiently anonymized, and in line with the aims and scope of the journal. Following this approval, your submission will be sent out to a set of peer reviewers with expertise in the subject area(s) of your submission. When you submit your manuscript, you will be asked for a set of suggested reviewers. We do our best to ensure that at least one of your peer reviewers is from this list, but are of course constrained by their availability and willingness to review. Suggested reviewers should not have been directly involved in the research described, and should not be from the same institutions as the authors on the paper. This journal uses a double-anonymous peer review model. This means that the identities of both the peer reviewers and the authors are kept hidden.
This journal usually requires a minimum of two independent peer reviewers to peer review manuscripts for consideration in the journal. Collecting a sufficient number of peer reviews can take some time, but generally this stage of review is complete in about 2-3 months. At that time, the editorial office will consider the reviewers’ feedback and recommendations, and deliver a decision to the author. This decision will be one of the following:
Accept: this means that the paper is accepted and will appear in a forthcoming issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice. There may be minor stylistic or formatting changes to make, but the paper requires no rewriting to proceed to publication.
Reject: this means that Advances in Archaeological Practice has declined to consider your paper for further consideration for publication in the journal. You will receive reviewers’ feedback for why this decision was made, as well as (if appropriate) suggestions for alternate directions for your submission. A reject decision is not a judgment on you as a scholar or your potential to contribute to the field; it is simply a decision that this paper is not right, at this time, for this journal. Everyone receives reject decisions in their career.
Revise & resubmit for editor’s decision: this means that the reviewers’ feedback was overall supportive of publication in the journal, but the paper requires some revision to be ready for publication. The necessary revisions are limited enough in scope that the paper, when revised, will not be sent out for further review, but it is the editorial office’s responsibility to determine if the revisions sufficiently address reviewers’ feedback to qualify for publication in the journal.
Revise & resubmit for limited review: this is the most common decision authors receive after their first stage of peer review. This means that the reviewers’ feedback was positive, but that there are concerns and suggestions that require substantial revision, such as restructuring, rewriting, or deletion/expansion of sections of the paper. In this case, after revising and resubmitting your paper, it will be sent back out for another round of peer review by one or two reviewers.
If your paper is accepted, it will proceed to the publication process after acceptance.
If your paper is rejected, you may submit it to another journal for consideration for publication. You are welcome to make another submission to the journal in the future, but if the paper is very similar to a paper that has already received a reject decision, it will not be advanced to peer review.
If you are invited to revise and resubmit, please work with the editor to set a deadline for the revision that is proportional to the revisions and changes required. When your revision is ready, please resubmit it using the instructions provided to you.
The peer review process is meant to serve not only the journal, but our authors as well. Peer reviews should consist of thoughtful, constructive critique meant to improve the paper. Since the goal of peer review is not to rush to a final decision, but to strengthen one another’s work, some papers may go through more than one round of peer review.