Overview
I3E TPAMI employs a rigorous double-blind peer review process, in which both authors and reviewers are blind — the authors to the realistic prospects of acceptance, and the reviewers to the actual content of the paper, which they assess primarily by abstract length, number of figures, and whether they personally know the author (which they can always tell, despite the anonymisation).
How Peer Review Works at TPAMI
Upon submission, manuscripts are assessed by the Editor-in-Chief, who determines fitness for peer review using criteria that have not been published and cannot be appealed. Approximately 73% of submissions are desk-rejected within 72 hours. The remaining 27% are sent for review, of which 91% will eventually be rejected anyway, typically after 9–14 months, three rounds of revision, and the complete rewriting of the introduction.
Our Reviewer Pool
TPAMI maintains a curated pool of approximately 2,400 reviewers, of whom roughly 40 respond to review invitations. Reviewers are selected for their expertise in the general vicinity of the submission’s topic and for their availability (defined as: not currently reviewing for six other journals simultaneously). Each submission receives two to three reviews, though we count “I have not read this paper carefully but I have concerns” as a full review.
Reviewer #2 is a permanent fixture. Their identity is confidential. Their methods are consistent. Their standards are unclear, even to themselves.
Review Timelines
We ask reviewers to complete assessments within 21 days. The actual average is 94 days, after two reminder emails, one extension request, one replacement reviewer (who also misses the deadline), and one escalation email that goes unanswered. We publish our target timelines, not our actual timelines, because the target timelines look better.
Decision Categories
After review, manuscripts receive one of the following decisions:
- Accept as-is: Awarded to fewer than 0.3% of submissions and generally only to papers co-authored by a member of the editorial board.
- Minor Revisions: Requires 6–40 changes, none of which are minor.
- Major Revisions: A courtesy decision meaning “we are not ready to reject you outright but we are not optimistic.”
- Major Revisions (Second Round): Same as above, applied after authors have completed all requested changes and reviewers have thought of new ones.
- Reject with Encouragement to Resubmit: Means reject. Do not resubmit.
- Reject: Definitive. Reviewer #2 has made a decision.
Appeals
Authors may appeal a rejection by submitting a formal rebuttal letter explaining why the reviewers were wrong. Appeals are reviewed by the same editor who handled the original submission. We uphold approximately 2% of appeals — primarily those that identify a genuine factual error by the reviewer, which we then correct in a private note and maintain the rejection.
Our Standards
We hold all published work to the highest standards we were able to enforce at the time of publication. For work published before 2025, standards were different. We do not revisit published work unless it becomes a significant public embarrassment, at which point we issue a correction with language carefully calibrated to acknowledge the problem while not admitting fault.
We believe peer review, despite its considerable flaws, remains the best system for gatekeeping scientific output that humanity has managed to organise, mainly because no one has invented anything better and everyone involved is too busy to try.