IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery

Suggestions to Reviewers

PWRD editorial board sincerely thanks the volunteer service of reviewers. We have experienced cases where the authors felt their work has not been given adequate professional treatment. We therefore provide the following suggestions to help reviewers’ work:

• Please treat a paper in the way you want your own paper to be treated. A paper represents considerable hard work by our colleagues. It deserves a certain level of care by the editorial board and reviewers;

• Please inform the editor immediately if you cannot review a paper. This will give the editor an opportunity to find other reviewers in a timely manner. Editors appreciate a dependable response, even if it is a decline to review;

• If a viewer is not familiar with the subject of a paper, we encourage the reviewer to decline the review request. This approach is much better than providing an uninformed review, as the editor could be misled by the comments and make wrong recommendations on the paper;

• Ratings (positive or negative) without support comments are not counted by the editorial board. Such reviews actually delay review process since a editor typically needs to find additional reviewers. We also encourage a reviewer to decline the review request if he/she does not intend to provide comments. Please inform the editor as soon as possible.

• When stating a paper lacks originality or the work has been done by others, please provide references or other evidences to support this claim (especially for a complex topic). Unsubstantiated general rejective comments are unfair to the authors. It is also very hard for authors to address them.

• Similarly, a generic positive comment without substance (for the R0 version) will not help the decision making of the editorial board. An example of such comments is “This is a good paper and it shall be accepted for publication”. In some cases, an editor has to find another reviewer to obtain more informative comments, which increases the review time.

• A good research paper does not have to be mathematically sophisticated. Lack of esoteric “academic values” shall not be a ground to reject a paper. Innovation comes in various shapes and forms. This is especially true for engineering oriented research.

• If a reviewer provides a negative (or positive) review on a  R0 paper but does not review the subsequent versions, it is very likely that the reviewer’s (original) recommendation will not be counted in the final decision making. This is because the system only displays the review results for the most recent revision. Therefore, a reviewer is recommended to follow through all revisions to ensure his/her views are taken into account by the editor/EIC, even if a simple comment such as “I am satisfied with the paper now” is sufficient.

Remarks

The following are examples of unsubstantiated general rejective comments that are unfair to authors and are very difficult for authors to respond/refute. We recommend reviewers avoid such an approach to paper review. On the other hand, the comments will become useful if they can be supported by specific references or substantiated technical justifications.

• This paper is well-written and organized. However, my main point of concern is that the paper does not appear to be characterized by adequate scientific/technical levels for an IEEE journal publication and it does not have enough contributions. The methodology proposed in the paper does not appear original.

• This paper presents a scheme to solve xxx. As we know, this method is not a new program, and in the past has been a considerable number of papers to present this issue. The contents of this article compared with the results of these articles stated no new point of view.

• This technique would degrade the accuracy of XXX. Very bad idea, very poor English.

• The theory and analysis in this paper are not new and should not be considered as a paper for Transaction level. If the authors can include actual field application and testing records, then this paper can be of some interest to readers.

• The impact of xxx was investigated in many papers and a few methods were proposed for this situation. Under this perspective, the innovation level is not high.

• The quality of the paper is not acceptable as a journal paper.

• The proposed method is not convincing. In practice, it is very difficult to solve the problem on which the method is based on. Therefore, the proposed approach is not going to work.