1. Journals usually have three trials: first trial-review-final trial.

Preliminary inspection/inspection

After receiving an article, the paper/editor-in-chief is usually required to make a preliminary review of the format and materials of the paper. The first trial is mainly to review whether the manuscript meets the requirements of this journal, to review the author's qualifications and unit information, and then to see whether the author's information is complete and whether the article format meets the requirements.

take a reexamination

After the first trial is passed, it will be sent to the editor-in-chief. The editor-in-chief will comment after reading it. If he thinks the article meets the basic requirements of our society, he will hand it over to the editorial board in similar fields.

The editorial board invites reviewers (peer review) according to the theme of the paper. There are generally about 2-3 reviewers in China, and there are at most about 5 SCI journals (the higher the quality, the more reviewers and professional authority). After the reviewers give feedback, the editorial board makes suggestions to the editor-in-chief (the editor-in-chief can't read all the articles by himself, and usually adopts the opinions of the editorial board). Generally speaking, the better the journal, the more reviewers there are, and the easier it is to be rejected.

There may be many reasons for the slow review: the guidance of periodical editors is not clear enough; Slow peer review; Increase in the amount of donations; The amount of data per paper increases and so on.

When reviewing the manuscript, if there are comments from social peers, the manuscript will be returned to the author for revision, and the manuscript will be accepted after the revision meets the requirements, and the manuscript will be rejected if the revision does not meet the requirements.

Make a final judgment

Generally speaking, at this point, if there is no big problem, the manuscript will not be rejected. After the editor-in-chief reviews the title, layout and content, he puts forward suggestions or replies, and the contributor can finally make changes according to the requirements of the magazine. The requirement is generally to send the source files such as pictures and tables in the article to editors for typesetting and the like.

First of all, the review cycle of a journal is usually around 1-3 months, and the review speed of a journal depends on the enthusiasm and goodwill of the reviewers, because peer review is quite time-consuming and laborious, and most of the review cycle is spent on it. At present, there are fewer and fewer reviewers who are willing to pay time and energy for free. Except for a few magazines with deep pockets, other magazines will try their best to save costs. For example, many ordinary magazines in China began to divide their work content, and arranged special people to assemble manuscripts and contact cooperative reviewers on the new media platform (so the author's point of view is a bit narrow, and the magazine also has real editors active on platforms such as Zhihu, after all, Zhihu is deeply loved by professionals in various fields).