IJAHP: Special issues, guest editors’ reflections International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process 1 Vol. 14 Issue 3 2022 ISSN 1936-6744 https://doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v14i3.1072 Special Issues, Guest Editors’ Reflections Birsen Karpak Distinguished Professor Emeritus Youngstown State University, USA bkarpak@ysu.edu Enrique Mu Professor, University Faculty Research Officer Carlow University, USA emu@carlow.edu Emel Aktas Chair of Supply Chain Analytics Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield, Beds MK43 0AL, UK emel.aktas@cranfield.ac.uk Ilker Topcu Professor of Decision Sciences Industrial Engineering Department Istanbul Technical University, Turkey ilker.topcu@itu.edu.tr ISAHP 2022 was an excellent meeting! We secured quite a few special issues for conference participants. Yet, these reflections are confined to the Journal of Enterprise Information Management (JEIM) and the Journal of Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (JMCDA). JEIM will be guest edited by Birsen Karpak, Emel Aktas and Ilker Topcu; we are pleased with this international cooperation among the USA, the UK, and Turkey. The guest editors for JMCDA will be Birsen Karpak and Enrique Mu. Even though we are reflecting upon submissions for the two journals (JEIM and JMCDA), quite a few of the following suggestions are useful for any special issue of IJAHP. First, do not submit to these journals before receiving our friendly reviews. Of course, you will receive a friendly review for JEIM from Birsen Karpak, Emel Aktas, and Ilker Topcu and from Birsen Karpak and Enrique Mu for JMCDA. The process is simple to receive a friendly review for your submission; just send your manuscript to Dr. Karpak, using the above e-mail, stating if you would like to submit it for review in JMCDA or JEIM. She will coordinate the friendly review with the other guest editors. A friendly review involves receiving friends’ suggestions about your manuscript, to the best of their knowledge, to position your paper in the best possible light to the reviewers. It may include suggestions on how to organize the paper and what to include in each mailto:bkarpak@ysu.edu mailto:emu@carlow.edu mailto:emel.aktas@cranfield.ac.uk mailto:ilker.topcu@itu.edu.tr IJAHP: Special issues, guest editors’ reflections International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process 2 Vol. 14 Issue 3 2022 ISSN 1936-6744 https://doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v14i3.1072 section. It is not a proofreading exercise, and a friendly review does not guarantee publication. The paper will still go under the blind review process that the journal follows. Independent reviewers will provide their feedback on its suitability to the journal with revision recommendations. After receiving the friendly review, you should improve your manuscript as much as you can and submit it to the appropriate journal. Your manuscript will be processed as soon as you submit it to the journal and a decision on whether it should be published will be made as soon as the reviewers’ reports are received. So, don’t wait until the submission deadline; submit your manuscript as soon as you can. We will try to accomplish a quick review. If a particular reviewer cannot do it, we might extend the time needed for the review; however, if we receive enough reviews, we will continue with the process and possibly cancel reviews not done on time. There are some journals that successfully implement this policy. We believe that, ideally, publications and reviews should be free services to the community for ethical reasons. Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. The submitted manuscripts will be sent to reviewers as they arrive, but the editors will have the last word in accepting or rejecting any manuscript. When the page proofs are finalized, the fully typeset and proofed version of the article will be published online. This is referred to as the EarlyCite version. While an EarlyCite article has yet to be assigned to a volume or issue, it does have a digital object identifier (DOI) and is fully citable. It will be compiled into an issue according to the journal’s issue schedule, with papers being added by chronological date of publication. Read the journal you are planning to submit to as well as the call for papers very carefully. (see Call for Papers JMCDA, Call for Papers JEIM). For this special issue of JMCDA, we invite original research contributions about the theory, computation, and practice of the Analytic Hierarchy/Network Process (AHP/ANP) and cross fertilization with other Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methodologies. We welcome high quality papers that address any type of decision problem, proposes methods and algorithms for solving them and describes important applications of the AHP/ANP by itself or with other MCDA methodologies in practice. Applications that have been implemented and affect managerial decisions are highly sought after. The deadline for special issue submissions to JMCDA is June 30, 2023. For JEIM, the UN’s Sustainable Consumption and Production patterns, Circular Supply Chain Governance, Role of Risk Analysis and Disaster Management in Resilient Supply Chains, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Digitalization, Blockchain, and Industry 4.0 are hot topics. Of course, we look forward to articles on any topic listed in the call for papers. The deadline for the special issue submissions for this journal is also June 30, 2023. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/10991360/CallFPapersJMCDA_NOV2022-1667494091497.pdf https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/calls-for-papers/ahpanp-supply-chain-resilience-era-digital-enterprise IJAHP: Special issues, guest editors’ reflections International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process 3 Vol. 14 Issue 3 2022 ISSN 1936-6744 https://doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v14i3.1072 Please read the scope of the journal carefully. In one of the quite high-quality special issues we arranged for our conference in the past, we had an excellent paper that we could not publish because it was out of the scope of the journal. Because of this experience, we will try to avoid out-of-scope submissions. It is to our advantage that we have more than one good quality special issue; one of the journals accepts any application and theory of Multiple Criteria Decision-Making methods. Have a reliable writer copy edit your manuscript prior to submitting it to a journal. Most of us have our own manuscripts copy edited, and quite a few of our colleagues, even some editors-in-chief, use professional proofreading services. Typos or English grammar construction errors that are present affect the editor as well as the reviewers’ thoughts either consciously or unconsciously about the quality of the whole submission, including the quality of the underpinning research. We cannot recommend any copy editor for ethical reasons, but you can receive recommendations from your colleagues and friends. One of the authors of this news article has recently published a paper without any minor revisions; it was copy edited by a professional copy editor. Remember that submitting a manuscript to a journal is, in a broader sense, inserting yourself into an existing conversation about your topic between the journal and its readers. So, be mindful of what has been said before about your topic in the target journal and cite it as part of your discussion. One of the authors of this news article attended a conference with several journal editors. One of them, an editor-in-chief of a reputable journal, said that they initially check the manuscript references, and if there are no references from the journal to which the author is submitting, they desk-reject the paper since that leads them to believe that no one from the journal is interested in this area of research. In any case, reviewing the journal to which you intend to submit your research is a good practice. You should look for any papers that are relevant to your submission that have been published in that particular journal. Be mindful that your manuscript for the special issue must be different from the conference proceedings on which it is based. Suppose you published just two pages of extended abstract to this conference. In that case, you don’t need to worry about publishing full papers in these special issues and in any other special issues though you should still be careful not to plagiarize it from your own paper. A common practice is using a different, rather extended title in the journal submission to state that this piece and the conference submission are two different, albeit related, research manuscripts. More importantly, if you wrote a final paper of five or more pages, you should write an entirely new article for these special issues. Otherwise, it might be rejected by the reviewers or by the editors. In any case, around five pages are sufficient for proceedings; we assume that everyone knows the proper article length for journals. Finally, follow the author guidelines for each journal and check your manuscript’s similarity to other works before submission. GOOD LUCK!