Article acceptance process
All articles submitted to the Journal of Transportation Engineering will be published after the necessary judging process and reviews. The authors' first and last names are not visible to the judges and the authors will not know the judges selected for their articles (Double-blind Peer Review). All the steps related to judging and accepting articles are given below.
By submitting an article to the journal, the editor first reviews the submitted article in the scheduled meetings with the esteemed editorial board. This will ensure that the content of the article is relevant to the aims and research areas of the journal. If there are any questions regarding the format of the article, its irrelevantness to the working content of the journal or its inappropriate writing, the responsible author will be notified by receiving an email from the editor. In this case, the authors have to correct and resubmit the cited article according to the reason for the initial citation. If the article is appropriate, the submission will be sent to the relevant judges and appointed by the editor and the editorial board.
The submitted files of the articles must be exactly in the format provided in the "Writers' Guide" section of the journal's website, and the figures and tables must be of good quality and legible.
In the initial stage, the article will be sent to three judges. The names of these judges are not known to the authors of the article. The judges are also unaware of the names of the authors. By sending an email to the referees from the journal, they must notify the journal of the rejection or confirmation of the article's judging by creating an account or using their previous account. If the article is accepted, the judges will be asked to submit their comments on the article to the journal by the date set by the editor.
When the initial judging process is complete, a file consisting of the opinions of the three respected judges will be sent to the responsible author. At this stage, the authors are asked to announce their answers to the judges within the specified time, if the article is not rejected in general. The judges' response, along with specifying the changes made to the original file of the article, must be re-uploaded to the website by the responsible author. The re-prepared answer will be sent to the same previous referees and this step will continue until all the referees confirm the acceptance of the article.
The final decision on accepting or rejecting the judged articles is always up to the esteemed editorial board of the journal. By making this decision, the responsible author will be informed of the final status of his article through the site.
The following is a general flowchart of the article acceptance process.