Review Process (aos-review-process)

When to trigger

• Calibrating expectations before or just after submitting to AOS
• A decision letter arrived and its signals need decoding
• You want to anticipate the reviewer mix an interdisciplinary journal will assemble
• You are deciding whether a rejected paper should be reworked for AOS or rerouted

How AOS handles a submission

• Triage by the joint EiCs. Three Editors-in-Chief share the desk (verified 2026-07-16: Marcia Annisette, Martin Messner, Hun-Tong Tan), with profiles spanning the journal's traditions — critical/interpretive, management accounting/qualitative, and experimental/JDM. Your paper will be read first by an editor fluent in its tradition; scope misfits are desk-rejected quickly, and the capital-markets-without-theory genre is the most frequent casualty.
• Double-anonymized refereeing. Reviewers are chosen for the paper's tradition and its theory: a field study using institutional theory may draw one accounting-field-study specialist and one reader closer to organization theory; an experiment draws JDM expertise. Expect referees who know the imported theory's primary sources.
• Decision types. Desk reject (scope/quality triage); reject after review; revise-and-resubmit in major or minor form; conditional accept. As across elite journals, acceptance is normally reached through one or more substantive revision rounds.
• Timelines vary with reviewer availability; the portal shows status. Re-check any process fact on the official Elsevier pages — this pack records durable structure, not current queue speeds.

What each referee archetype presses on

Archetype	Standard objections
Interpretive/field specialist	Depth of engagement; traceability of interpretation; theory doing work
Social-theory reader	Fidelity to the imported tradition; primary sources misread or thinned
Experimental/JDM reader	Confounds, process evidence, participant-pool fit, effect inflation
Generalist accounting reader	Why accounting is central; what the field's conversation gains

Write and revise anticipating two archetypes at once — the classic AOS tension is satisfying the theory reader without losing the accounting reader.

Reading the decision letter

• The editor's own paragraphs outrank the reports: where the editor restates your contribution, that restatement is the target the revision must hit; where the editor selects among conflicting reviewer demands, follow the selection rather than averaging.
• Classify every reviewer point: (a) misunderstanding you caused — fix the writing; (b) substantive gap — new analysis or fieldwork returns; (c) paradigm disagreement — argue it respectfully once, with sources.
• A "reject with encouragement to submit new work" is not an invitation to resubmit the same paper lightly edited; AOS editors remember manuscripts.

If the decision is negative

• Diagnose which bar failed: scope (wrong journal), theory (lens decorative), or evidence (thin engagement/underpowered design). Reroute scope failures to a sibling venue (MAR, AAAJ, CPA, BRIA, CAR) rather than re-arguing AOS's mission.
• Salvageable theory/evidence failures may return to AOS as genuinely new papers after substantial rework — flag the history honestly in the cover letter.

Before you submit: the two-referee dry run

Give the draft to two colleagues playing different archetypes from the table above (one theory reader, one accounting/method reader) and collect their objections cold. Papers that survive this dry run rarely meet a review surprise; papers that skip it usually meet both archetypes for the first time in round one.

Checklist

• Submission matched to the tradition an EiC can champion
• Manuscript survives both of its likely referee archetypes on a cold read
• Decision letter mapped: editor's frame identified; points classified (a)/(b)/(c)
• Conflicting reviewer demands resolved by the editor's steer, not by averaging
• Negative decision diagnosed (scope/theory/evidence) before any next move

Anti-patterns

• Averaging incompatible reviewers instead of following the editor's synthesis.
• Relitigating scope with an editor whose desk rejection was about the journal's mission.
• Resubmitting a rejected paper barely changed under a new title.
• Reading referee tradition-blindness as malice — write the bridge paragraphs instead.

Output format

【Stage】pre-submission calibration / decision received ...
【Likely referees】archetypes and their objections ...
【Editor's frame】the contribution as the editor restates it ...
【Point classification】(a) writing / (b) substance / (c) paradigm ...
【Diagnosis if negative】scope / theory / evidence → reroute or rework ...
【Next step】aos-rebuttal (on R&R) or aos-topic-selection (on reroute)