Peer Review Process

The Journal of Rehabilitation in Civil Engineering peer review policy is based upon a single-blind peer-reviewing system. To be considered, all works should be submitted through our online editorial manuscript management and handling system. Therefore, submitting the author should have an account on the system.

 

- Submission

This step is carried out by the submitting author through our manuscript submitting system.

 

- Structural Assessment

The journal director inspects the article in regards to journal guidelines implementation and containing all the needed data and files. In this step, the manuscript might be un-submitted and returned to authors to add the lacked material or to imply adjustment following journal guidelines.

 

- Editor-in-Chief Assessment and Processing

The Editor-in-Chief inspects the manuscript in regards to the journal scope, originality, and impact. Taking into consideration that this is the first quality assessment checkpoint, the article might be rejected, or adjustments might be suggested by the editor at this step.

 

- Check for Plagiarism

At this step, the manuscript is inspected for plagiarism, and depending on the similarity check software report by iThenticate, the manuscript is either progressed into the review phase or rejected due to similarities. The acceptable similarity percentage is less than 20%.

 

- Reviewers Suggestion and Invitation

The editor in chief in this stage can directly send invitations to experts in the field. The editor in chief might also consult more specialized associated editors to nominate reviewers. The invitation procedure continues until two reviewers accept the invitation (the manuscript state is changed to under review). In some cases (advanced methods and a delicate case of studies), more reviewers might be invited.

 

- First Decision after Review

Depending on reviewers evaluation report for the article (additional reviewer might be invited in case of conflict between reviewers’ reports), one of four decisions are to be made by the journal board

  • Acceptance
  • Minor revision required
  • Major revision required
  • Rejection

This decision is sent to the corresponding author along with reviewers’ reports to help revision procedure or to explain the rejection decision.

 

- Revision and Re-submission

After a proper revision, the author resubmits the manuscript along with complimentary data if needed. Furthermore, the author should provide a complete report of the new adjustments in light of the reviewer’s requests and answers for the editor or reviewers’ questions. The author has the right to reject one or more of the revisions. However, he/she should provide an explanation for this rejection or suggest other adjustments.

 

- Final Decision

After revisions, the final decision is to be made by the journal board. If the revision was satisfactory, the manuscript is accepted and sent for the publisher.

 

The Journal of Rehabilitation in Civil Engineering will publish quarterly (four times a year). However, accepted manuscripts will be available online directly after acceptance and have a futuristic publishing date of the nearest upcoming periodical issue.