Cornell Philosophical Review | Editorial Policy

The Philosophical Review

Manuscript Submission Instructions
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E D I T O R I A L_P O L I C Y

The Philosophical Review practices blind review - that is, manuscript readers are not aware of the identity of a manuscript's author, and the editors are not made aware of the author's identity until they have reached their final decision on the manuscript.

Our in-house editorial board is composed of two faculty members of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, who serve terms of six to twelve months. Each submission is read by both editors. If a manuscript passes this initial review stage, it is sent to an expert referee for further evaluation. Occasionally, papers are refereed by other members of the Sage School; more often, they are refereed by philosophers not at Cornell.

The initial, internal review typically takes three to four months. When a paper is sent to an expert referee, the review process is thereby extended another four to six weeks; an author whose paper is being sent to a referee will be so notified.

We receive 250-300 submissions per year; of these we are able to accept only 12-15 (for an acceptance rate of about 5%). Rarely is a manuscript accepted outright - most published papers have undergone at least one round of revision.

The great majority of submissions do not pass the initial review, for a variety of reasons: the manuscript may be (a) not sufficiently original, (b) not sufficiently grounded in the relevant literature, (c) too specialized to be of interest to a general readership, (d) too heavily weighted to history or exegesis and not enough to philosophical content; more rarely, a manuscript may simply demonstrate faulty reasoning. Unfortunately, the editors are not able to provide comments or a rationale for their decision, except in the case of a paper that is being encouraged; they simply don't have the time. We hope that authors will understand and excuse this limitation, and that it is somewhat mitigated by the quick turnaround time for the initial review.

Papers that are accepted are usually published within twelve months of the date of acceptance. Authors are given the opportunity to review one set of proofs before publication.