All articles submitted to our journals are double-blind peer-reviewed prior to publication. The reviewer doesn’t know the identity of the author, and vice-versa.
An initial assessment of each article is usually made within the first four weeks after submission and, if it is considered to merit further evaluation, it will be forwarded to an external referee for a more detailed review.
The final decision is usually made within eight to twelve weeks.
About one-third of articles are rejected in the first round.
The usual reasons for rejection at this stage are:
- insufficient originality,
- poor statistical analysis,
- lack of ethical standards,
- lack of a message that might be relevant to a general psychiatric audience,
- focus on topics far beyond the scope of our journal.
For research articles, editorial decisions are made focusing primarily on the research question: even when the general topic is relevant and interesting we may reject the article if the study does not address a research question or if it does not add enough to the field of research on a given topic.
Double-blind peer review
Reviewers provide comments, must sign their reports, and declare any competing interests in all manuscripts they comment on.
Editorial decisions
Decisions are usually one of the following:
- provisional acceptance (subject to satisfactory revisions),
- request for revisions (when the article is assessed as interesting, but there is insufficient information to reach a final decision, so that answering the reviewers’ questions will hopefully lead to a satisfactory revision),
- rejection.
If our judgment was ‘revision’, we invite authors to return their articles within the next month.