Peer review policy and guidelines

AIP Publishing understands the nature and purpose of conference proceedings and their essential role within the field of scientific communication. We encourage you to provide proceedings that contain work that is of long-term interest and benefit to the scientific community; in other words, articles that can be read and cited with confidence. To achieve this goal, we have strengthened our requirements for proceedings editors to commit to undertaking an appropriate peer-review process. Conference organizers and editors may select their reviewers, but all reviewers must be suitably qualified experts in the field. Although AIP Publishing does not prescribe the number of reviewers per manuscript for the proceedings, all reviews must be conducted according to the standard norms and expectations of an ethical review process. A robust peer-review process will reflect the quality of the published proceedings, providing recognition of the editors’ work and enhancing the value of your proceedings to abstracting and indexing services.

Guidelines

Compared with journals, proceedings can publish a much wider range of articles, providing scope and opportunity to create comprehensive proceedings volumes. In addition to original research manuscripts, AIP Conference Proceedings welcomes review or tutorial articles and other works that provide useful summaries, background information, or introductions to specific fields of research. We also welcome articles that provide a historical perspective or review. AIP Publishing understands that the specifics of the review process will need to be according the community’s and conference’s traditions or expectations. Keep in mind that although proceedings include a broader range of article types, they should not include poor quality or inferior work that is fundamentally unworthy of publication.

We ask all editors and associated referees to evaluate each manuscript according to the following minimum criteria.

Contribution: Would publication of the article make a positive contribution to the scientific literature? What would you gain by reading it? An article’s contribution does not need to be new or unpublished results; for example, it can have the following attributes:

  • New explanations of familiar topics
  • Excellent descriptions or explanations of complex subjects
  • Tutorials or review articles
  • Useful or interesting background information
  • Enjoyable and informed historical perspective or overview
  • Be more than an abstract (we reject 1-page, abstract-only articles)
  • Have merit (through its rigor, accuracy, or correctness)
  • Be original (previously unpublished and solely the work of the author)

Include an abstract (with a sufficient summary of the paper and outline of goals, results and conclusion, including conveying sufficient understanding when read in isolation from the paper)

  • Have an adequate title (correctly describes the article such that reading it alone would convey the nature and content)
  • Have reasonable conclusions (based on the results presented, or ideas/concepts discussed)
  • Is clear and concise (well-expressed ideas readable and understandable by its intended readership)
  • Uses correct English (sufficiently conveys the science and intent/meaning or purpose)

Poorly written papers will be returned to the authors for re-writing or will be rejected if the author is unable or unwilling to make the recommended improvements.

References

References will depend on the type of article; however, here are some general questions you may like to consider.

  • Do the references look appropriate for the topic? Are key papers missing that you would expect to see?
  • Is the distribution of journals and publications cited, and age of the citations, appropriate?
  • Do the references demonstrate that the author is aware of current and key research in their field?