Step 4: Letter from the Editors
When three referee comments have arrived, I send these to the senior editors. We are fortunate to have some world class scholars on our refereeing panel ,who often provide lengthy and detailed reports. The editors read these, and use them to guide their decision about the paper’s future. There are five possible suggestions that a referee can make:
Accept without corrections
This happens once in a blue moon. I have been working on the journal for almost four years and during that time only one paper has flown through the process in this way! Please don't be discouraged if your paper does not receive this outcome.
Accept with minor corrections
Also a rare outcome, achieved by only the most polished papers. Minor corrections involve you making small tweaks and attending to matters of detail (perhaps adding a paragraph here or there to explain something in more depth). We expect you to be able to complete this level of revision in 2 months.
Accept with major corrections AND Revise and resubmit
I'm grouping these two together because the line between ‘major corrections’ and ‘revise and resubmit’ is blurred. Both options require you to undertake some fairly major structural and substantive work on your paper – which means setting aside several days for careful thinking and reworking in order to respond to referee comment properly. We allow authors 6 months to complete major corrections.
Reject
Unfortunately, sometimes the referees disagree with the editors, and decide that an article isn’t of publishable quality. Regrettably, we then have to reject the submission.
What happens when referees disagree?
It is quite common for the three referees to produce there reports with entirely different recommendations about the paper. For example, we often face a situation where one referee recommends minor revisions, one wants to see major revisions, and the third advises rejection of a paper!
Unlike some other journals where editors send out contradictory referee reports and leave the author to make sense of the confusion, at Planning Theory and Practice we aim to steer authors through the process of revision. To this end, our senior editors spend a considerable amount of time discussing referee comment and writing you a detailed and personalized letter explaining which features of the comments they believe are most significant. They use this letter to outline exactly what they feel needs to be done.
Essentially, this means that when you receive the letter, you are obtaining no less than five people’s ideas about your work!
It normally takes around 2 weeks for the editors to write their letter.
The average time lapse between original submission and receipt of an editorial decision letter is 12 weeks.
