Arecon review process

Review Process — What to Expect (arecon-review-process)

When to trigger

• The commissioned draft is delivered and you want to know what happens next
• You are unsure whether an invited review is auto-accepted (it is not) and what it is judged on
• You need to plan around the annual-volume production schedule
• A coauthor expects journal-style turnaround and you must reset that to the Committee cadence

How an invited ARE review is evaluated

Being invited gets your draft reviewed, not accepted. After delivery, the Editorial Committee assesses the manuscript for accuracy, rigor, and balance, and may route it to another Committee member or an external expert as appropriate (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准). The bar is the review-article bar, not the primary-research bar:

Stage	What happens	What it tests
Commissioning	Committee invites the topic/author; scope is set	fit, author standing, ARE-shaped topic
Delivery	author submits the invited draft in the commissioned workflow	completeness, format, declarations
Committee/expert review	a Committee member and/or external referee read it	accuracy, rigor, balance, accessibility, coverage
Revision	author addresses comments (see arecon-revision)	gaps closed; fairness restored; spine sharpened
Production	production editor copyedits, sets figures, applies house style	format, references, figure quality
Volume publication	article appears in the annual volume (open access under S2O)	—

Special-case integrity: if a Committee member is the author, they do not participate in reviewing their own article, which is handled by another member or external expert under the same policies (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准).

Timeline reality

ARE runs on an annual cadence: one volume per year with fixed production deadlines (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准). This differs sharply from a rolling journal — there is no continuous queue, and a draft that misses a volume's production window can slip to the next volume. Treat the production editor's schedule as the binding constraint and plan revision time backward from it. Do not assume journal-style "decision in N months"; confirm the specific volume timeline with the editor.

What referees push on (and how to pre-empt)

Because ARE referees judge the review as a review, the predictable pushbacks are upstream-preventable:

• "You omit literature X." → arecon-literature-synthesis saturation log; close the gap before delivery.
• "This slights school Z / over-cites the author." → arecon-evidence-standards balance + self-citation audit.
• "This reads like an annotated bibliography." → arecon-organizing-framework; make the spine explicit.
• "A non-specialist can't follow Section 4." → arecon-writing-style; intuition-first.
• "You mischaracterize study W." → fix precisely; the reviewed author may be the referee.

Checklist

• Team understands invitation ≠ acceptance; the draft is reviewed for accuracy/rigor/balance
• Expectations set to the annual-volume cadence, not journal rolling turnaround
• Production deadline obtained; revision time planned backward from it
• The five predictable referee pushbacks pre-empted upstream before delivery
• Any author–Committee conflict-of-interest handled per Annual Reviews policy
• Volatile timeline/process re-confirmed with the editor / on the author pages

Anti-patterns

• Assuming an invited review is rubber-stamped — it is refereed for rigor and balance
• Expecting rolling-journal turnaround instead of an annual production schedule
• Discovering a coverage or balance problem at review that the saturation log would have caught
• Missing the volume production window and slipping a full year
• Quoting a specific decision timeline from memory rather than confirming the volume schedule

Output format

【Stage】commissioning / delivery / Committee-review / revision / production
【Bar】judged on accuracy + rigor + balance + accessibility + coverage? confirmed
【Cadence】annual volume; production deadline obtained? Y/N · 待核实
【Pre-empted pushbacks】coverage / balance / framework / accessibility / appraisal — checked? Y/N
【COI】author–Committee conflicts handled per policy? Y/N
【Next step】→ arecon-revision (after the comments) → arecon-submission (re-deliver)