Peer Review Process

Papers published in PiHPh are subject to peer review through both pre-publication scrutiny and post-publication review.

The pre-publication process involves members of the editorial and advisory boards evaluating submissions to check that they are on topic, meet standards of academic publication, and have the formatting that PiHPh requires. If problems can be rectified by minor edits, we may make these and send the file back to the author for checking (after which we would expect to publish the paper). If major issues are identified, the paper will receive a 'revise and resubmit' or 'reject' decision. The categories under which the latter two decisions may be made are (i) that a paper is conceptually fundamentally flawed, (ii) that the consideration of data is fundamentally flawed, (iii) that it does not have any originality, (iv) that there are major typographic problems, (v) that there are major proof-reading issues or major problems with clarity of expression, or (vi) that the paper does not address historical issues in any sense. PiHPh uses this checklist for the pre-publication evaluation process. As indicated there, we ask those undertaking the pre-publication evaluation to submit the first comment.

PiHPh's post-publication review is conducted on each paper's comments page. All readers are encouraged to post comments on this page (as are members of the editorial and advisory boards). Authors are also encouraged to reply to these comments, and the discussion after a paper's publication becomes an independently citable part of the publication. All comments are moderated, but only to ensure that they are on topic and not ad hominem. The guidelines for commenting are available here.

PiHPh's review process should thus ensure that publication is swift for papers which are not obviously unsound. We hope that post-publication commenting will allow readers and authors to discuss both positives and problems that are identified in papers.