Typically, within three weeks from submission, you will be contacted by the editor-in-chief with news of whether or not the submission will be advanced to the first round of reviews (or is being rejected as not suitable for publication in the journal). If the submission is accepted for the first round of reviews, a panel of reviewers and editor will be assigned to blind review your submission. This is often called double-blind, which means that the reviewers do not know the submission author’s identity and the author is never privy to the names of the reviewers.

The first round of reviews usually concludes approximately 12 weeks later with the paper’s editor sending the corresponding author a letter regarding acceptance. Whether or not the paper will be advanced for further review or publication, at the conclusion of the review, the editor provides you with a development letter using the input of the reviewers. The decision may be to reject, conditionally accept pending specified revisions, or accept the paper. Most commonly papers that are accepted require several rounds of revision. Since the submission may require several rounds of review and most of this time is determined by how promptly the author responds, there is no meaningful average time between submission and publication or rejection. While most rejections occur within one week of submission, submissions may be rejected during the review cycle. After the editor accepts a paper, articles appear online as soon as the publisher completes final quality assurance of the accepted paper.