ijoc-review-process

name	ijoc-review-process
description	Use when calibrating expectations for the INFORMS Journal on Computing (IJOC) review cycle — the Area-Editor desk-reject gate, the undisclosed associate editor, single-blind reviewing, decision types, and whether a sibling journal fits better. Sets expectations and strategy; it does not draft the rebuttal (see ijoc-rebuttal).

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