Review Process (fcr-review-process)

Knowing how FCR screens and decides lets you pre-empt the failure modes before submitting. FCR screens hard against scope at the editor stage, then uses a single-anonymized review with typically at least two reviewers.

When to trigger

• Before submitting, to stress-test against desk-rejection grounds
• Interpreting a decision letter and setting expectations
• Understanding what reviewers and editors weigh in field-crop science

How FCR review works

1. Editor scope screening first. Editors assess suitability before review. The most common desk-rejection grounds are scope failures:
   • Controlled-environment only — greenhouse, pots, or any root-restricting system as the main evidence.
   • Single site, single season — not the expected ≥ 2 seasons and/or multiple environments.
   • Descriptive / corroborative / local — no new scientific insight of general relevance.
   • Out-of-scope species — horticultural, woody-perennial, medicinal, or non-cultivated species.
   • Inadequate English or methods too incomplete to evaluate.
2. Single-anonymized review. Reviewers know the authors; authors do not know the reviewers. Suitable papers are sent to typically two or more expert reviewers.
3. Decision categories. Reject / major revision / minor revision / accept (exact labels per Editorial Manager). Revisions are common; address every point.
4. Co-submission. Related data/methods may be routed to Data in Brief / MethodsX.

Shape the paper to pass

• Make scope fit obvious in the cover letter, abstract, and introduction (field-based, multi-environment, field crop, general relevance).
• State the novel contribution and link results to yield / biophysical process.
• Use statistics that match the design (mixed models, G×E) so a methods reviewer is satisfied.
• Report enough agronomic detail (soil, weather-vs-phenology, management) to be reproducible.
• Make the discussion interpret, not repeat — a frequent reviewer complaint.

What each gatekeeper weighs

A submission passes three readers, each with a distinct veto. Anticipating who blocks on what lets you pre-empt the objection in the right section.

Worked screening vignette (illustrative)

Illustrative walk-through. A paper reports a 0.7 t ha⁻¹ sorghum yield gain from a sowing-date shift over 2 seasons at 3 sites. The editor's scope screen passes: field-based, 6 site-years, a field crop, plausibly general. The methods reviewer flags that sowing date was applied to whole strips with cultivar nested inside, so the strip-plot error must be used — the original ANOVA over-stated significance. The agronomy reviewer wants the effect tied to escaping terminal heat at anthesis, a phenology mechanism, not just a number. Realistic outcome: major revision — refit with the correct error term, add phenology-vs-temperature evidence, and scope the recommendation to terminal-heat environments.

Anti-patterns

• Submitting controlled-environment-only or single-site/single-season work to a multi-environment journal
• A descriptive "we measured X here" paper with no general insight
• Wrong error structure or pseudoreplication that a methods reviewer will catch
• A discussion that restates results without agronomic interpretation
• Conclusions not justified by the data

Review-risk pass for Field Crops Research

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the crop system, environment structure, GxE logic, and yield or physiology endpoint; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: agronomy reviewers who expect field-based, multi-environment evidence and crop-level general significance.

• Do the pass: Turn probable reviewer objections into a ledger with response evidence, manuscript location, and the decision-maker who must be convinced first.
• Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
• Sibling guard: compare against Agricultural Systems for whole-system modeling, European Journal of Agronomy for agronomic breadth, Crop Science for cultivar or breeding emphasis; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
• Submission-ready gate: do not give final advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for upload-week rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Scope screen】field-based? ≥2 seasons/envs? field crop? general? — any red flags?
【Novelty】new insight of general relevance stated? [Y/N]
【Statistics】design-appropriate (mixed model / G×E)? [Y/N]
【Reproducibility】agronomic detail + data availability ready? [Y/N]
【Realistic outcome】reject / major / minor revision / accept
【Next】fcr-submission (or fcr-revision-and-rebuttal once decided)

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — review model, reviewer count, scope-based desk-rejection grounds