Review Procedure

All the manuscripts that are submitted to the journal Advances in Polar Science will be peer reviewed following the procedure outlined below:

1. Type of Peer Review: Journal employs single blind review, where the referee remains anonymous throughout the process.

2. Referee reports: Typically the manuscript will be reviewed within six weeks. Should the referees’ reports contradict one another or a report is unnecessarily delayed, a further expert opinion will be sought. Revised manuscripts are usually returned to the initial referees within 2 weeks after receipt by the authors. Referees may request more than one revision of a manuscript. The most useful referee reports, therefore, are those that set out clear, substantiated arguments and refrain from recommending a course of action in the comments directed to the authors.

3. Final report: Based on referees’ advices, the Associate Editor decides to:

• Accept the manuscript, with or without minor revision
• Invite the authors to revise the manuscript with minor or major revision
• The manuscript is rejected with an invite to resubmit the work as a new paper once additional experiments have been carried out
• Or reject the manuscript, typically on grounds of specialist interest, lack of novelty, insufficient conceptual advance or major technical and/or interpretational problems

A final decision to accept or reject the manuscript will be decided by Editor-in-Chief and be sent to the author along with any recommendations made by the referees, and may include verbatim comments by the referees.

4. Embellishment: We will provide free of charge English Editing service for the adopted articles written by non-English native author.

Review Requirements:

The editors of Advances in Polar Science greatly appreciate the tremendous collective contribution that reviewers make to our journal and the articles they publish. We hope that the guidelines described below will help facilitate peer review as a conversation between authors and reviewers, and as an essential element of the publication process. We encourage reviewers to contact the editorial office at any time if they require additional information or assistance.

Reviewing (or re-reviewing) revised manuscripts

For the sake of editorial consistency and fairness to the authors, we request that referees who agree to review one version of a given manuscript also commit to reviewing future revisions if necessary. In an effort to minimize the resulting burden, we make every effort to handle revisions editorially and to curtail unproductive resubmission cycles.

Writing the report

The primary purpose of referee reports is to provide the Associate Editors with the information that they need to reach a decision, but they should also instruct the authors on how to strengthen their manuscript if revision is a possibility. Referees are asked to submit both confidential comments to the Associate Editor and those that can be directly transmitted to the authors.

Advances in Polar Science is committed to rapid editorial decisions and publication as efficiency in this process is a valuable service both to our authors and the scientific community as a whole. We therefore ask that referees respond promptly or inform us if they anticipate a significant delay, which allows us to keep the authors informed and, where necessary, find alternative referees.

Comments for transmission to the authors

Referees are asked to maintain a positive and impartial, but critical, attitude in evaluating manuscripts. As far as possible, a negative report should explain to the authors the weaknesses of their manuscript, so that they can understand the basis for a decision to ask for revision or to reject the manuscript.

The ideal report should include:

• An initial paragraph that summarizes the major findings and the referee's overall impressions, as well as highlighting major shortcomings of the manuscript.
• Specific numbered comments, which may be broken down into major and minor criticisms if appropriate (numbering facilitates both the editor's evaluation of the manuscript and the authors' rebuttal to the report).