Hello Everyone,

I am sure every Journal will have their own set of criteria for papers approval but I am interested to know, what is the general process? what happens when papers are submitted for publications? Is it checked against previous work? do they check references?

I heard somewhere that most referees don't go beyond the introduction section? so what happens when a research paper is found invalid after approval (years after or sooner)? I have asked too many questions but I hope it will help new students like me :) Many thanks

It varies from journal to journal, but the general process is that it's sent to a reviewer who is known to specialise in a similar area. Things like your question regarding references, some reviewers will be especially conscientious (or interested) and will look them up - as I say most will be a specialist in that area anyway and may or may not be familiar with the referenced material already.

Of course then assuming it's accepted it's published and thrown out into the wider community for scrutiny, at that point errors and omissions will also be picked up and people may write in to point them out. This will be passed to the author for comment and both the initial letter and author's comments will be published in a later journal.

If it's completely baseless, or found to be fraudulent or similar at a later date, the journal might publish a withdrawal.

I've worked on a journal for over 4 years now and I've never known a reviewer to only read the introduction!!

Hey! Most journals have a peer-review policiy, which means that when you submit your paper, a copy of it will be sent to two or three anonymous reviewers (people who are considered to be suitably qualified/experienced to pass judgement on your work), who review it and send comments back to the editor. Based on this, the editor will make a decision whether to accept the paper, accept it as long as certain changes are made, ask you to resubmit it if extensive changes are required, or reject it altogether. Usually there is also an initial screening by the editor, so that if the paper is completely unsuitable (e.g. a review paper is sent to a journal that only accepts empirical papers) then it will rejected straight away, instead of being sent to the reviewers. In terms of references, if there are any discrepancies between those mentioned in the text and those listed in the reference section, the proofreaders will pick up on this if the referees haven't already done so. I haven't heard of any reviewers not going beyond the introduction section- reviewers are able to refuse to review the paper if they haven't got the time, so I would think that anyone who was not prepared to read the whole paper would just refuse to review it at all. I have heard complaints about the reviewers being unsuitable- some journals let you suggest who suitable reviewers might be, but for many the editorial team make the decision. Of course, once your research is published, if people find fault with it in some way they can comment on that in future publications of their own etc. There are some journals which don't use a peer-review system, but we have always been recommended to steer well clear of those- journals without a peer-review system don't tend to be very well regarded. I should point out that I am doing a PhD in Clinical Psychology- some of this information may be different for people in different fields! Hope that helps, KB