What can authors do to facilitate the review of their paper
To find dependable and interested reviewers is the most critical step affecting the paper review time. While an editor plays a significant role to find proper reviewers, authors can greatly facilitate this work by paying attention to the following items. (Please note that a high quality and interesting paper is always the most important factor to attract reviewers. The following suggestions are supplementary tools for authors to consider).
1. Keywords
Keywords here refer to those entered into the paper submission forms when a paper is submitted. These keywords are used by some editors to find relevant reviewers in the manuscript center database. Since reviewers are identified using the key words available in the database, it is important for an author to use the exact key words in the database (i.e. don’t enter self-created keywords). This will facilitate an editor to use proper keywords search to find relevant reviewers.
2. References
Journal papers cited by a paper under review are valuable sources for an editor to find potential knowledgeable reviewers. It is, therefore, beneficial for authors to study recently published journal papers and cite them as references IF they are relevant. If a reference is published in a PES transaction, the PWRD manuscript center generally has the authors’ information so they can be easily selected as reviewers. (Sometimes, the reviewers of the reference could be selected as reviewers). Experiences show that authors of old papers and conference papers are either not available in the database or they don’t respond to paper review requests. Authors of conference papers and technical reports are generally not suitable to be reviewers of journal papers unless they have published journal papers in the post.
3. Author recommended reviewers
Author can recommend reviewers. Some editors may use one of such reviewers. Experiences show that author recommended reviewers often don’t respond to invitation for review or they conduct superficial reviews. Therefore, it is important for authors to recommend dependable, unbiased reviewers so that the review process is not unduly delayed.
4. Support comments
If an author wants to highlight the importance of a paper, he/she can do so using the boxes of support comments in Step 5 of the paper submission process. Such comments can be seen by reviewers, editor and EIC. Support comments can help editors and EIC to assess the reviewers’ comments, especially for papers receiving conflicting reviews.
5. Cover letter
A cover letter is not accessible to reviewers. So any comments written in the cover letter cannot be appreciated by the reviewers. Instead, cover letter should be used to provide confidential information to editor and EIC when there are disagreements with the reviewers. It can be a powerful tool to help authors (see the disagreement resolution section on how to use this tool). Other than this function, there is no need to write a cover letter unless the decision letter requests an author to do so.