IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery

Common Mistakes and Omissions Delaying Paper Processing

First Pass

PWRD editorial assistants or administrators first check your paper to determine if proper information is provided and if it meets minimal editorial requirements. The following mistakes or omissions will take the administrators more time to release the paper to the Editor-in-Chief (EIC). In some cases, the paper is submitted because of the following reasons:

• A paper is not prepared according to the PES transaction format
• A paper exceeds the 8 page limit for first submission
• It contains other redundant pages such as figures in separate pages
• There is inconsistency in the numbering of figures and tables
• Not all co-authors are entered in the paper submission form

In addition, the administrators conduct other checks such as if the authors are in the IEEE Prohibited Author list.

Second Pass

The EIC will conduct a quick check on the editorial/technical aspects of a paper before starting the formal review process. Some mistakes or omissions can result in authors being requested to re-submit a revised paper or the paper or the paper may be rejected without review.

Administrative rejections (not resubmission allowed):

• Paper does not fit in the scope of TPWRD
• A paper has high a degree of similarity with other publications (same or different authors)
• A paper is a resubmission of a recently rejected paper
• A paper has extremely low quality and processing it is a clear waste of reviewer time (see below “editorial rejection”)

Administrative rejections (resubmission allowed):

• A paper is not formatted according to the PES guidelines. Frequently authors modify the format to fit more information. The fonts of figures and tables are too small. The author affiliation is removed, etc.
• A paper is too difficult for reviewers to comprehend due to language issues
• A paper’s colored figures are unreadable if they are printed in black&white by reviewers
• A paper does not contain adequate support references in the subject area
• A paper needs improvement on some obvious aspects (such as the abstract is too long or inadequate title)
• A paper has two parts but only one part is submitted
• A paper exceeds the 8 page limit or has too few pages

Third Pass

After a paper is assigned to an editor, the editor will do one more technical screening to determine if a paper is worthy to be reviewed. If a paper is not suitable for review, it will be returned to EIC and a  decline-to-review decision will be issued to the author. Characteristics of such papers are:

• A paper does not fit the scope of PWRD and there is a more suitable IEEE journal for the paper
• A paper has extremely low quality and processing it is a clear waste of reviewer time (see remark on “editorial rejection”)

Remarks

About references 
Support references are important information to editorial board and reviewers. They help to determine (1) if a paper’s subject is of wide interest to research community, (2) if the type of work has journal-grade archive value, (3) which journal fits the paper best, and (4) who could be the qualified reviewers (authors who have published transaction-grade papers in the same topics can be good candidate reviewers). Some reviewers also need to rely on journal-grade references to assess the current paper. Therefore, it is important for a paper to contain adequate amount of relevant English journal papers as its support references (such as 10 to 15, depending on the area).

When citing references, it is a good practice to consider the most recent publications since they demonstrate that (1) your paper deals with a timely subject and (2) it has considered the latest developments. Citing the first one or two original papers which initiated the research topic is ethical. It is understandable that papers covering a brand new area may have less peer-reviewed papers as support references.

Conference papers, websites, or reports may be cited but they carry much less weight to support your paper since their results/viewpoints are often not peer-reviewed rigorously. Reports can be hard to access by the reviewers. The number of such references shall be much fewer than the number of the peer-reviewed English journal references. The same applies to papers published in non-English journals as it is very hard for reviewers to check such references. It is best to avoid them altogether unless it is a seminal work that is widely available.

About page limit
To be consistent and fair to all authors and papers, every paper must be less than or equal to 8 pages for initial submission. More pages could be added for the revised versions (see the decision letter). If some critical materials cannot be included due to page limit, you may include them in a separate supplement file for the purpose of providing information to the reviewers. Alternatively you may consider a two-part paper. Please think carefully before using these tools as it is difficult to predict how the reviewers will react.

Please note that PWRD has a global page limit each year even if authors pay for the extra pages. Therefore, the use of extra pages by multiple papers will affect the total number of papers that can be accepted/published each year. This is the main reason PWRD discourages papers with excessive number of pages. Authors shall try to limit a revised paper to 10 pages.

If an accepted paper has exactly 8 or 9 pages (i.e. no blank space left), it is possible the print version can exceed 8 or 9 pages. This implies page charges for a few extra lines. If an author is concerned with this possible outcome, he/she may just use about 7.75 or 8.75 pages or no biographies when the paper is submitted for review. More information on this topic can be found from “For Accepted Papers” section.

About submission of two part papers
Two part papers must be submitted together so that they can be evaluated by the same reviewers at the same time. This will facilitate reviewers to gain full understanding on the contributions of the work and on potential overlaps. If only one part of a paper is submitted, the paper will not be processed until the missing part is also submitted.

About similarity check
IEEE uses a text authentication tool to screen for plagiarism. The screening database includes papers, reports, websites, theses, etc. The tool provides information for EIC or editor to do further analysis. If such an analysis finds a manuscript having high similarity with published materials, the manuscript may be rejected administratively or returned to authors for revision. Typically, a similarity of more than 10% is not acceptable. Although strongly discouraged, for application papers published in IEEE/PES GM or T&D conferences a higher similarity may be allowed. However, the paper still must have new content reflecting new data, experimental results, analysis, conclusions, etc.

Authors of research papers can certainly submit work extensions, but all text, tables, figures, results, etc. must be original. The paper must contain a substantial contribution above and beyond any published material. An author can refer to previous publications, but only small amounts of material (and only if essential for the understanding of the new paper) are to be reproduced from them (of course proper reference should be given).

TPWRD only considers original papers that have not been published in other journals or conferences. If a paper is accepted by PWRD, authors can request to present the paper in one of the PES conferences. More information can be found from http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/plagiarism_FAQ.html.

Should you resubmit a paper rejected for similarity concerns?  It is recommend to resubmit only if the paper has a substantial contribution to the scientific knowledge or technology of TPWRD subjects. It must contain only original text, figures, tables, etc.  To make sure that our editors and reviewers understand your intended contribution above and beyond material already published, authors should be very explicit about the differences with previous publications. It is up to the authors to demonstrate the novelty and value of the paper.

About paper title
The title of a paper shall reflect the contents of the paper and be concise (the same applies to abstracts). Title that contains regional or company-specific information implies a narrow focus or creates an impression of commercialism (unless the paper is about the technical practice of the region or company and is written as an application paper type). An example of such inadequate titles is “Voltage control optimization of ABC company’s device” or “Voltage control optimization of ABC region of country X”. The title shall also avoid the use of acronyms. Acronyms can create difficulties for readers to search the paper, leading to lower citations.

About paper format 
Paper format is the first impression of a paper giving to the reviewers. If an author wants his/her paper to be taken seriously by reviewers, it is important to follow the format of PES papers exactly. An easy way to find the correct format for preparing a PWRD paper is to study anyone of the published PWRD papers. In addition, papers sent for reviews must not have figures shown in separate pages. Such mistakes can be easily detected by checking the PDF version of the materials submitted. An author shall submit the manuscript that contains all figures and tables embedded in the text. Please do not submit figures or tables as separate attachments. The latest paper format can be download from here.

About key words 
In addition to helping paper search after it is published, keywords of a paper are used by some editors to find relevant reviewers. Since reviewers are identified using the keywords available in the database of the manuscript center, it is important for a paper to use the exact keywords in the database, at least for some of the keywords. This will facilitate and speed up the review process.

About texts in illustrations 
Reviewers often review papers in a print form. The texts in the figures or other illustrations must not be too small to read by reviewers and readers when the paper is printed in hard copy. The minimum font size of any text in figures should be at least 8 pts. (as a reference it is the same as the figure caption). Other forms of illegible illustrations include curves with similar colors, crude images of circuit diagrams, etc.

About short papers
Papers less than or equal to 4 pages shall be considered for submission as a Power Engineering Letter (PESL). PESL has a separate website for submission. If accepted by PESL, the letter may be published in PWRD if it falls into PWRD scope.

About resubmission of rejected paper
Immediate resubmission of a rejected paper even with revisions will be detected and the paper will be rejected without review. Re-processing rejected paper is essentially equivalent to finding a group of volunteers (reviewers and editor) to help an author to improve his/her research. It also overloads the review process. Therefore, the re-submission of rejected papers is strongly discouraged and is monitored closely. Some rejected papers can be resubmitted after additional research work. The decision letter will inform the authors if their paper can be considered for resubmission. (Also see: http://site.ieee.org/tpwrd/pwrd-resource-site-paper-rejection/)

About cover letter
Cover letter is a useful venue for authors to present important information to the editorial board (see the disagreement resolution section). The letter is not accessible to reviewers. So it is not useful to highlight a paper’s contributions or provide other technical information in the cover letter. An author does not need (and is not recommended) to provide a cover letter if there is no special information to share with the editorial board. Please do not use cover letter to present author responses to review comments.

About editorial rejection
In recent years, PES transactions have experienced significant increase in paper submissions. Some of the papers have very low quality. For example, some papers are submitted mainly to get feedback from reviewers so that the author can be better prepared for thesis defense or the author can improve the paper for submission to other journals. There are also cases where students submit reformatted project reports as papers just to see what happens. Such examples represent an abuse of the peer-review process. If a transaction always assigns three or more reviewers to any submitted papers, the review process will breakdown due to overloaded and dissatisfaction of reviewers. In response to such situations, all PES transactions have started to use the option of editorial rejection, i.e. if a paper has an extremely low quality and processing it is a clear waste of reviewer time, a transaction will decline to process such a paper.