The review process at JEI is run entirely by volunteer Reviewers and Editors. The majority of our volunteers are graduate students working towards their PhD or individuals completing a post-doctoral fellowship; however, we also have many volunteers outside of these categories including individuals who work for large scientific companies, professional science writers, and laboratory technicians.
We are always looking for more volunteers - if you are interested in volunteering or have a connection you would like to share with us, please let us know at apply(at)emerginginvestigators.org.
Because JEI is an educational journal for junior scientists, our core goals differ from those of professional journals. As opposed to using the review process to select for only highly innovative and novel research, at JEI we strive to:
Empowering students means that during the review process we, through our volunteers, work hard to provide constructive feedback on their manuscript. We want our authors to understand what they have already done well in their manuscript, but also point out areas that could be improved in order to increase the clarity of their work. We would love it if every student that published with JEI became a scientist; however, ensuring students are empowered to follow their passions and recognize their own potential is far more important.
Learning how to communicate science is a skill that can take many different forms. At JEI, students are exposed to a more formal way of presenting their research to a general audience. This forces our authors to think about how to explain more complex topics so they can be understood by all while at the same time making sure that none of the science is lost. We believe that by directly participating in our review process and receiving feedback from established scientists, our student authors/scientists will gain more than they would by just reading formal research papers
Authors can expect for their manuscript to be reviewed by 8+ individuals at JEI from the time it is initially submitted until it is published. Each volunteer with JEI will provide feedback on the manuscript to help refine it and give suggestions on how to rework some sections or even ideas for future experiments! Please see our Review Timeline page for more detailed information on each step of the review process.
Keep in mind that taking extra time to ensure that you are submitting the correct and fully revised manuscript files will save you time in the long run! If you submit a manuscript and not all of our comments have been addressed, you forget a file we need to look at, etc. we may not realize this until two weeks after you submitted depending on how busy we are. We then have to send you the manuscript back to fix these mistakes and it goes back to the bottom of our queue when you resubmit. This means you could lose 2+ weeks of time by trying to submit your manuscript to us quickly after getting comments from us.
The short answer is no, student authors may not have more than one manuscript submitted to JEI. We have this policy because if students take our review process seriously they will learn hopefully many concepts that they could (and should) use to improve any future manuscripts. By only allowing one submission at a time from student authors we are providing the chance to improve subsequent manuscripts before they are submitted and hopefully decrease the overall time to publication for those subsequent manuscripts as a result.
Senior authors/mentors may have multiple submissions with JEI at once. If you are unsure if your submissions would violate this policy, please reach out to us at submissions(at)emerginginvestiagators.org.