---
name: bjps-review-process
description: Use to understand how the British Journal of Political Science (BJPS) evaluates a manuscript — double-blind review with at least two referees, the desk screen, decision categories, and what reviewers are asked to weigh. Sets expectations and shapes the paper to survive review; it does not contact editors.
---

# Review Process (bjps-review-process)

Knowing how BJPS screens and decides lets you pre-empt the failure modes before submitting. BJPS uses
**double-blind** review usually involving **at least two referees**, and an editorial team drawn from
across the discipline screens for fit before sending a paper out.

## When to trigger

- Before submitting, to stress-test against desk-screen grounds
- Interpreting a decision letter and setting expectations
- Understanding what reviewers are instructed to weigh
- Deciding whether the paper's general interest is strong enough to send out for review

## How BJPS review works

1. **Double-blind.** Reviewers do not know the authors and authors do not know reviewers. Anonymize the
   manuscript accordingly: remove author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, funding notes, and links
   to personal/university websites (see `bjps-submission`).
2. **Desk screen first.** The editorial team assesses fit — **wide political-science interest**, scope,
   adequate English, and basic competence — before external review. A competent but parochial
   (single-subfield or single-country-framed) paper is a common desk-screen casualty.
3. **External review.** Papers passing the desk are sent to **at least two** expert referees, who weigh
   the contribution's significance, the soundness of theory and design, and the credibility of the
   evidence on the method's own terms.
4. **Decision categories**: reject / revise-and-resubmit / (rarely on first round) accept. An R&R is a
   genuine signal; conditional acceptance follows a convergent revision (待核实 exact category labels on
   the live page).
5. **Format-aware screening.** Letters are held to "complete short contribution" standards; Comments
   are judged on whether they engage the target article accurately and add to the record.

## Shape the paper to pass

- Make **wide interest** explicit (avoids the parochialism desk-screen failure).
- Engage the relevant literatures, including across subfields and countries.
- Clear ethics/consent and human-subjects compliance up front.
- Anonymize thoroughly — broken anonymity can compromise double-blind review.
- Write to expert reviewers: anticipate the strongest objection and answer it in the design.

## Anti-patterns

- Submitting a single-subfield or single-country-framed paper to a broad generalist journal
- Ignoring an obvious related literature across subfields/countries
- Expecting an R&R for a paper far from publishable — R&R signals near-readiness
- Leaving self-identifying material that breaks double-blind anonymity

## Output format

```
【Desk-screen check】wide interest / scope / English / competence — any red flags?
【Interest】broad enough to clear the parochialism screen? [Y/N]
【Literature engaged】incl. cross-subfield / cross-national? [Y/N]
【Format】Research Article / Letter / Comment — held to its standard?
【Realistic outcome】reject / R&R / (rare) accept
【Next】bjps-submission (or bjps-rebuttal if decided)
```

## What BJPS referees probe, by tradition

BJPS draws referees from across an international discipline, so a single paper may be read by a
comparativist, a formal theorist, and a methodologist at once. Calibrate to whichever lens is decisive,
but expect the wide-interest question to be asked by all of them.

| Tradition | The check a BJPS referee runs first | The fix that earns the benefit of the doubt |
|-----------|-------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------|
| Comparative / single-country | Does the case speak to a general mechanism, or stay local? | State what the case is a case *of* and what travels |
| Observational causal | Is the "causal" word doing more than the design licenses? | State estimand + assumption; sensitivity to a confounder |
| Survey / lab experiment | Is inference randomization-based and pre-registered? | Randomization inference, pre-registered estimand, MDE reported |
| Cross-national quantitative | Do measures mean the same thing across countries? | Report measurement equivalence before pooling |
| Formal / interpretive | Does the argument buy a non-obvious, portable result? | Name the comparative static / the conceptual move it enables |

## Calibration anchors (hedged)

- BJPS's premium is **wide interest across countries and subfields** — a competent but parochial paper
  is a common desk-screen casualty even when its within-niche execution is sound.
- The journal practises **methodological pluralism**: a rigorous qualitative, formal, or interpretive
  paper is not second-class to a regression. Match the inference standard to the design.
- Exact decision-category labels, referee count, and time-to-decision can change — confirm against the
  journal's current peer-review guidelines before relying on them.

## Supplementary resources

- [`../../resources/official-source-map.md`](../../resources/official-source-map.md) — peer-review policy, double-blind model, referee count, decision categories