P-ISSN: 2664-8776
E-ISSN: 2664-8784
Peer review is the process where independent experts assess a manuscript before an engineering journal publishes it. In double-blind review the reviewers do not know who wrote the paper, and the authors never learn who reviewed it. At this journal every submission goes to a subject editor first, then to two reviewers, and the Subject Editor takes the final decision.
Most authors meet engineering journal peer review for the first time when their own paper is in it, which is a stressful way to learn how it works. This guide sets out what actually happens, what reviewers are looking for, and why so many papers fail on the same few points.
| Model | Author knows reviewer? | Reviewer knows author? |
|---|---|---|
| Single-blind | No | Yes |
| Double-blind (used here) | No | No |
| Open | Yes | Yes |
Double-blind exists to remove a specific problem: reviewers unconsciously judging a paper by the reputation of the institution on the front page. It is not perfect — a reviewer who knows the field well can often guess the group from the methods or the self-citations — but it removes the easiest form of bias, and it protects early-career authors most.
Reviewers’ comments to the editors are confidential. What reaches you is the anonymised version, together with the decision.
Reviewers are not hunting for reasons to reject. They are answering one question: can I tell exactly what was done, and do the results support the conclusion? Almost every negative report traces back to one of these:
None of these need more experiments. They need you to write down what you already did.
Double-blind only works if you help. Before submitting, remove your name and affiliation from the body, check the acknowledgements do not identify your group, and look at the file properties — Word stores the author name in the document metadata, which authors forget almost every time.
Self-citation is the other giveaway. “As we showed in our earlier work [7]” identifies you immediately. Write “an earlier study [7] showed” instead. You still get the citation; you just do not sign it.
Review at an engineering journal takes as long as it takes — reviewers are working researchers doing this unpaid. What you control is your own turnaround. The revision window here is one week, and the single biggest delay in most published papers is an author sitting on reviewer comments for a month.
Our guide on responding to reviewer comments shows the response format that gets papers through the second round quickly.
Reports from an engineering journal vary, but most arrive as a recommendation plus a numbered list of comments. The recommendation is one of four:
| Decision | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Accept | Rare on a first submission | Check the proof carefully |
| Minor revision | The science stands; clarify and tidy | Usually a few days of work |
| Major revision | Something substantive is unresolved | Answer every point; this is not a rejection |
| Reject | The objection cannot be fixed by rewriting | Read which stage rejected you |
“Major revision” frightens authors more than it should. It means the reviewers think the work is worth publishing once a real problem is addressed. Papers are lost at this stage far more often through a weak response than through a weak result.
Reviewers are researchers in your field, which is exactly why they were asked. A reviewer who genuinely has a conflict is supposed to decline. In practice the far commoner problem is the opposite — a reviewer who knows the area so well that they assume detail you never wrote down, and then ask for it.
Speed depends on how quickly two busy people reply, not on how carefully they read. A paper can clear review in three weeks because both reviewers happened to be free. What should worry you is a journal promising a fixed turnaround before it has seen your manuscript — nobody can commit to that honestly.
It does not, and cannot. Two people reading a document cannot rerun your experiment. Review checks whether the work is reported well enough that someone else could rerun it, and whether the conclusions follow from what you reported. That is a narrower job than most people assume, and it is why replication still matters after publication.
Two checks run in parallel with the reviewers’ reading, and both can stop a paper on their own:
Every minute a reviewer spends working out what you meant is a minute not spent on your findings, and confusion resolves against the author. Four habits do most of the work:
Two things get said about peer review, and both are wrong. Peer review at an engineering journal is not a guarantee of correctness — two people reading a manuscript cannot replicate your experiment, and errors do get through. It is also not a rubber stamp: a journal that publishes whatever arrives is not running review at all, whatever its website says.
What you should check before submitting anywhere is whether the process is described at all. This journal sets it out on the peer review and publication policy page: initial editorial read, two reviewers, double-blind, Subject Editor decides. An engineering journal that cannot describe its own process in a paragraph is telling you something.
Neither side knows who the other is. Your name, affiliation and contact details are stripped from the manuscript before it goes to reviewers, and their identities are never disclosed to you. The point is that the paper is judged on what it says, not on where it came from.
Two. Before that, the subject editor reads it once to check it fits editorial policy and meets a minimum quality level. Papers that fail that first check never reach reviewers.
You may name two potential reviewers in your cover letter, with their contact details and affiliation. It is optional, and the editor is not obliged to use them. Suggesting people who cannot possibly be objective — your supervisor, a co-author — wastes the opportunity.
Whether the work is original, whether the method is described well enough to be evaluated and repeated, whether the results support the conclusions, and whether the reporting is complete. Writing quality matters only where it stops them understanding what was done.
The Subject Editor, based on both reviewers' reports. Where substantial revisions were requested, acceptance depends on whether you have dealt with them satisfactorily.
What happens either side of review:
Created by Keshav Gupta • 26 Jul 2026
P-ISSN: 2664-8776
E-ISSN: 2664-8784
International Journal of Research in Engineering
