With electronic submission of manuscripts and reviews, J-BHI aims to minimize the time from submission to publication and make the review process as transparent as possible to the authors by allowing online status checks of the review progress.
The IEEE EMBS is also applying sanctions against authors who have plagiarized work or are discovered to have made duplicate submissions to other journals.
Below is an overview of the process for manuscript review:
- Manuscript submitted via ScholarOne;
- Submission Conformance Check by the editorial office, including paper formatting, author consent form and all supplement materials; the manuscript will be returned to the author if the paper fails to meet the J-BHI requirement;
- Paper sent to Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for screening and assigning to Associate Editors (AE);
- Internal review of the quality and suitability of the paper, the manuscript may be rejected without external review if the paper does not fit the scope of J-BHI or the quality of the paper does not meet the minimal standards as required by the Journal. Manuscripts passing the screening process will be sent out for peer-review;
- Paper assigned to AE for reviewer assignment;
- AE contacts reviewers for confirmation and the peer review process starts;
- Reviewers send back reviews to AE;
- AE makes recommendation to EIC about the outcome of the paper and EIC makes the decision, i.e., rejection, minor/major revisions;
- For those invited/encouraged for revisions, author submits revised paper to the journal followed by a further review cycle;
- Final decision made by EIC;
- Publication upon paper acceptance.
Every effort will be made to keep all those involved to ensure the timeliness of the peer-review schedule. The outcome of the review will be one of the following:
- Accept without changes – this applies to outstanding papers that can be published as it is or revised papers that have successfully addressed all concerns raised during previous reviews;
- Accept pending minor revision – this applies to high-quality papers that require minor improvement on methodology, clarification and improvement on presentation details, which can be realistically addressed in 3 weeks; a detailed rebuttal will be required from the authors on how the reviewers’ comments have been addressed during re-submission; papers with minor revision may or may not go to external review as determined by the Associate Editor in charge;
- Reject/Resubmit (major revision and new external review required) – this applies to papers with good quality but require substantial changes to rectify technical problems, introduce additional results, and improve paper structure and presentations; the authors will be given up to 10 weeks (except for papers submitted to special issues/sections, for which the revision period is determined by the corresponding guest editors) to resolve these issues and prepare a detailed rebuttal on how the reviewers’ comments have been addressed during revision; all papers with major revision will always go to another round of external review. Please note the J-BHI editorial policy that for each paper, only one round of major revision is permitted, if the review recommendation for a revised paper triggers another major revision, the paper will be rejected automatically;
- Reject – this applies to papers that should be rejected without further consideration or should be directed to an alternative journal that maybe more suited to the contents of the paper.