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):
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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
