Family Medicine editor-in-chief
Many people express confusion about the process of submitting a paper to a journal, receiving peer reviews, and ultimately getting published. This post attempts to answer your questions. Editors do not want their activity to be opaque. We want everyone to know what really happens when you submit a paper. The team at Family Medicine may do things a little differently than other journals, but the major steps will be the same.
You hit “submit”, then what? Once you submit your paper into the electronic portal (we use ScholarOne) the paper will be evaluated by our editorial assistant. S/he will determine if your paper conforms to our author instructions (please read before submitting) for formatting and whether you have IRB approval, if needed. The assistant will unsubmit your paper if it is too long, has too many references, or if the references are not in the proper format.
First review by the editor in chief: At Family Medicine, I read each submitted paper carefully before assigning it to an associate editor. I will occasionally reject a paper at this stage if it is not in scope for our journal (ie, we do not publish clinical papers) or if I think it is in the wrong category. For example, papers describing educational studies in one residency or one medical school fit in our Brief Report category, but probably not in Original Research. I will send those papers back to the authors if they are submitted in the Original Research category and ask the author(s) to shorten them. Another common mistake I often see is papers submitted as a narrative essay when they are really a commentary or an editorial. Narratives are personal stories about an experience you have with patient care, teaching, or your career.
Assigning papers to the associate editors: We have a team of fabulous associate editors at
Family Medicine. Papers that are both in scope and of interest our readers go on to the next step. I assign these papers to one of our associate editors who carefully reads the paper again, and either advises me they don’t think the paper is appropriate for our journal, or, more commonly, sends the paper for peer review.
Requesting peer reviewers: We have hundreds of peer reviewers who volunteer their time and expertise to help us publish the best papers we can. The associate editors aim to get 2-3 reviewers to evaluate each paper before sending it back to me with a recommendation. The associate editor sends requests to 4-6 people. Sometimes these invited reviewers don’t respond, and sometimes they respond but decline the invitation. It will occasionally require upwards of 10 invitations to find the 2-3 reviewers needed for a thorough review of each paper. We give all peer reviewers 3 weeks to return the review. Sometimes a
paper will be caught in this step for a few months. Family Medicine designates 4 potential
outcomes for a paper after peer review: accept (it’s very unusual to accept after initial peer review),
minor revision, major revision, and reject.
Revisions: The vast majority of authors will be asked to revise their paper. This is a good thing.
It means that the editorial team believes that the paper will be an important addition to the literature when revised. We expect authors to respond to every reviewer comment and explain how they addressed each comment. After the revised manuscript is submitted, I will review it again and then send back to the associate editor. In some cases, if there were many revisions, the associate editor will send the revision back to the reviewers to assure that all comments were addressed. After those reviews come back, the associate editor indicates an outcome. It is not unusual for a paper to be revised a second (and occasionally a third) time. It is important for authors to remember at this point that these further reviews are designed to improve your paper.
Recommendations for publication: Even great papers can be improved, and this is always the goal of peer review. Our peer reviewers and our associate editors provide feedback to authors to help make
their papers better. A minor revision decision signifies that a paper needs only small changes before it is appropriate to publish. A major revision decision signifies that the peer reviewers and the associate editor like the paper and think it has potential to be a meaningful addition to the scholarly literature, but has some weaknesses. We do not ask people to revise a paper if we do not think it will be interesting to our readers and contribute to the literature. Those papers are denied further review.
Acceptance: Once the associate editor believes that the authors have addressed all revision
requests, they send it to me with a recommendation for publication: Yay! Our production
team has worked hard to decrease the time from acceptance to online publication. You may expect your paper to be published online about 6 weeks after you get your acceptance notice. It will be available on the journal’s ‘Recently Published’ page before being assigned to a monthly issue. As you can see, there are a lot of steps in the process! However, they all aim to support authors through optimizing their paper’s impact.
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