Review Process

The review process has been designed to provide quality reviews in a timely fashion. Delays in the review process result from a complex mix of misalignment of incentives for referees and Associate Editors, along with the submission of poorly written and/or excessively long papers. To address these delays and provide quality reviews, the Editorial Board has established a number of goals and steps to achieve these goals.

Goals

1. After the author submits the paper to an Area Editor, the basic decision on the suitability of the manuscript will take one month, including a quick review by an Associate Editor, if necessary.
2. If the manuscript is deemed suitable, the entire process of sending the paper to referees will start; authors will receive their reviews within four months from submission. The Area Editor can, however, make exceptions to this four-month cycle time for papers that he or she deems too long or complex. Such papers may require more time for careful reviewing. Thus, our goal is not rapid turnaround, which can always be achieved with short and uninformative reviews. Rather, Operations Research aims to provide authors with high-quality reviews in a timely fashion.
3. The target review time for first revision is three months and all subsequent revisions should take no more than two months. Exceptions are made in case of long and/or complex manuscripts.