conbio-review-process

Review Process (conbio-review-process)

Knowing how Conservation Biology screens and decides lets you pre-empt the failure modes before submitting. The journal is double-blind (adopted October 2014) and screens at the desk for scope, novelty, and conservation relevance before external review.

When to trigger

• Before submitting, to stress-test against desk-rejection grounds
• Deciding whether to use the Registered Reports route (where offered)
• Interpreting a decision letter and setting expectations
• Understanding what reviewers are instructed to weigh

How review works

1. Double-blind. Neither authors nor reviewers know each other's identities; the manuscript and the authors' identities are anonymized (see conbio-submission). Adopted to reduce intentional and unintentional bias and broaden participation.
2. Editorial screening first. An editor (and, in the journal's editorial structure, regional/ handling editors) screens for fit and conservation relevance, novelty/transferability, adequate English and completeness, and ethics. Papers that are sound but inconsequential, or purely local/descriptive, are common desk rejections.
3. External review. Papers passing the desk go to expert reviewers, who weigh novelty, transferability, methodological soundness, and direct implications for conservation.
4. Decision categories: typically reject, major/minor revision (revise and resubmit), or accept. Expect revision rather than outright acceptance on a first decision.
5. Registered Reports (where offered): a two-stage route — Stage 1 (introduction + protocol) is reviewed and can receive in-principle acceptance before data are collected/analyzed; Stage 2 adds Results and Discussion. Choose this before you have results.

Shape the paper to pass

• Make conservation relevance and transferability explicit (avoids the "sound but inconsequential" desk rejection — see conbio-conservation-relevance-and-implications).
• Engage the relevant conservation literatures, including across disciplines.
• Match methods to the question and address detection, scale, and counterfactuals up front.
• Clear ethics, permits, animal-care/IRB, and sensitive-data handling.

Anti-patterns

• Submitting a local/descriptive study with no transferable conservation lesson
• Ignoring an obvious related literature
• Expecting acceptance without revision on a first decision
• Choosing Registered Reports after results exist
• Leaving author identity detectable in a double-blind submission

Review-risk pass for Conservation Biology

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the species/system threat, conservation decision, and uncertainty relevant to action; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: conservation-science reviewers who ask whether evidence changes biodiversity, management, or policy action.

• 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 Biological Conservation for applied conservation breadth, Global Change Biology for climate/ecosystem process, Ecology Letters for theory-forward ecology; 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

【Desk-rejection check】scope / relevance / novelty / completeness / ethics — red flags?
【Conservation relevance】explicit and transferable? [Y/N]
【Literature engaged】incl. cross-disciplinary? [Y/N]
【Route】standard vs Registered Reports (Stage 1)
【Realistic outcome】reject / major-minor revision / (rare) accept
【Next】conbio-submission (or conbio-revision-and-rebuttal if decided)

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — double-blind policy, reviewer guidelines, decision categories, Registered Reports