IJPE uses single-blind peer review. Reviewers are aware of the identity of the authors, but authors are unaware of the identity of the reviewers.

Review Criteria

Each review should be conducted in a fair and an impartial manner. It should be exclusively on the basis of the manuscript’s academic merit including originality, contribution, soundness, presentation, and relatedness.

• ● Each manuscript will be evaluated by at least two reviewers. Additional reviewers are required if a paper receives controversial comments.
• ● Each accepted paper must have at least two ACCEPT recommendations from independent peer reviewers.
• ● Under no circumstances can a paper be accepted without revision if it receives at least one Major Revision recommendation from any reviewer.
• ● A paper is allowed to go through at most TWO (2) iterations (initial submission and revision). After the revision, except for very minor editorial changes, if the paper still cannot be accepted, any additional revision must be submitted as a new submission.
• ● A revised submission must include a separate list at the beginning of the manuscript detailing how each reviewer’s comment is addressed.
• ● IJPE has a long tradition on being strict about overlapping/plagiarism between submissions and previously published papers. The maximal allowed ceiling is 35%. Any submission that is over this limit will be rejected. The best way to avoid this problem is to not copy and paste paragraphs from other papers, including their own publications.
• ● Editors in charge of review must provide appropriate justifications to support their decisions of acceptance, revision, or reject. The justification cannot be over-simplified. It is inappropriate to say that a paper should be rejected (or accepted) because the reviewers have suggested so. Editors should read all the comments and determine whether there are any contradictions between a reviewer’s recommendation and his/her detailed comments. Any recommendation without appropriate justification should be excluded.
• More precisely, editors’ decisions should not be based only on reviewers’ recommendations without examining their detailed comments. If any suspicious and/or inconsistent comments are observed, editors should use their best judgment to determine whether those comments should be discarded. If the decision is to include them, editors may consider lowering their weight while making the decision.
• ● Final decisions regarding the publication of manuscripts are made by the Editors-in-Chief based on the handling editor’s recommendation and all reviewers’ comments.
• ● Articles published without external peer review (such as editorials of special issues/sections by guest editors) are evaluated by the editors-in-chief.
• ● Information related to the peer-review will be systematically collected and analyzed to help improve the quality of the process. All information remains confidential to IJPE.

Timely Review

Post Review

• ● Once a paper is accepted, authors cannot make changes to the technical contents beyond those noted in the reviews and the editor’s decision letter. Otherwise, the paper will be returned to the corresponding editor for further evaluation. It is also not acceptable to add additional authors or remove those listed on the accepted version.
• ● After a paper is accepted, authors are encouraged to submit the required files to IJPE following the instructions provided in the decision letter and to address all editorial inquiries from IJPE in a timely manner to avoid possible delay of the publication of their paper.

Review Flowchart

• ● Pre-processing: The focus is on the scope and format such as page length and whether important components (e.g., abstract, keywords, conclusions, references, etc.) are included.
• ● Plagiarism check I: Manuscripts with more than 35% (*) overlap with published literature will be desk rejected without external review. Authors may reference the plagiarism reports to improve their papers by reducing the overlap percentage and submit revised papers as new.
• (*) The plagiarism report will be carefully examined to determine whether the overlap is due to the post of a preprint of the article to the authors’ own website, their employer’s site, or some open-access repository such as Arxiv. These factors will be taken into account and the final decision will be made on a case by case basis.
  
• ● Technical evaluation and revision: Refer to the review mode, review criteria, and important guidelines described above.
• ● English proficiency: English writing of all the papers that pass the technical evaluation will have to be examined to ensure good and effective communication. Authors of papers with poor English are required to work with IJPE editorial office to improve the writing before publication.
• ● Final Editing: IJPE Editorial Office will conduct required editing to ensure that accepted papers comply with the journal’s publication style. Communication with authors may be necessary for issues such as providing figures in higher resolution.
• ● Plagiarism check II: While almost all journals conduct only one plagiarism check before the technical evaluation, IJPE requires a second plagiarism check before a paper is published. This is critical because the plagiarism percentage of a paper may go up between a submission to its publication as new articles are published.