ijoc-review-process

Review Process (ijoc-review-process)

When to trigger

• You are about to submit and want to understand the gates and likely timeline
• A submission has been silent and you are unsure where it sits in the IJOC pipeline
• A decision arrived (reject / major / minor) and you need to read it correctly before responding
• You are weighing whether IJOC or a sibling (Operations Research, Management Science, MPC, IJOO) is the better home after a tough first round

How the IJOC pipeline actually works

The cycle has a structure worth planning around (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准):

1. Area-Editor suitability gate. Your chosen technical area routes the paper to an Area Editor who first judges fit. Roughly 40% are desk-rejected here for being out of scope, computing-light, or mismatched to the area. This gate rewards the ijoc-topic-selection and ijoc-contribution-framing work: an Area Editor who cannot see the computational advance in the abstract and intro will not send it out.
2. Associate-editor handling — blind to you. Survivors are assigned an associate editor who manages the review and whose identity is never revealed to authors. You cannot tailor a response to "the AE"; write to the report content, not the person.
3. Single-blind refereeing. Reviewers see your names; you do not see theirs. Reviewers are typically active researchers in your area who will know the current methods and may try to reproduce your results from the deposit — another reason the GitHub artifact must actually run.
4. Decision. Outcomes are the usual reject / major revision / minor revision / accept. A major revision on a computational paper often means re-running experiments (more instances, fairer baselines, more seeds), not just rewriting.

Reading an IJOC decision letter

Triage every point by what it really demands:

| Referee theme | What it usually means | Where to fix |

|---------------|----------------------|--------------|

| "comparison is unfair / baseline weak" | re-run against the SOTA / current solver, symmetric tuning | ijoc-data-analysis |

| "instances cherry-picked / too small" | full standard set + scaling | ijoc-data-analysis |

| "contribution unclear / incremental" | sharpen the claim and positioning | ijoc-contribution-framing / ijoc-literature-positioning |

| "no guarantee / correctness unproven" | add validity/complexity argument | ijoc-theory-development |

| "cannot reproduce" | fix the deposit; align results to scripts | ijoc-data-analysis |

| "out of scope for this area" | re-argue fit, or consider sibling/area change | ijoc-topic-selection |

Sibling fit after a hard round

If the recurring objection is "the contribution is the OR model, not the computing," the paper may belong at Operations Research; if it is "this is optimization theory," at INFORMS Journal on Optimization; if it is "pure MP-computation," at Mathematical Programming Computation. Conversely, a strong computational result rejected elsewhere as "too applied/computational" may fit IJOC well. Decide before burning a revision cycle on the wrong venue.

Checklist

• [ ] Abstract/intro make the computational advance visible to clear the Area-Editor gate
• [ ] You expect to write to report content, not to a named AE
• [ ] The deposit runs, in case a referee tries to reproduce it
• [ ] Each decision-letter point is triaged to the owning skill and classed as re-experiment vs. rewrite
• [ ] A major revision plan budgets compute time for re-running experiments
• [ ] The sibling-fit question is answered if scope objections recur

Anti-patterns

• Treating the Area-Editor gate as a formality and submitting a computing-light paper
• Trying to guess and flatter the (undisclosed) associate editor
• Submitting a deposit that does not run, then being surprised by a "cannot reproduce" report
• Reading a "major revision" on experiments as a rewrite job and not budgeting compute
• Re-submitting to IJOC when the persistent objection says the paper belongs at a sibling

Output format

【Journal】INFORMS Journal on Computing
【Skill】ijoc-review-process
【Stage】pre-submit / in-review / decision-received
【Gate read】Area-Editor fit risk; AE undisclosed; single-blind noted
【Decision triage】point → owning skill → re-experiment vs. rewrite
【Compute budget】re-run plan if major revision
【Sibling check】stay IJOC / consider OR / MS / MPC / IJOO
【Next skill】ijoc-rebuttal