Focus and Scope

The International Journal of Forest Engineering is dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly writings in all aspects of forest operations, both empirical and theoretical. Most published articles are original research, but review articles are also welcome.

An important role of the IJFE is to report on existing practices and innovations in forest engineering by scientists and professionals from around the world to promote environmentally sound forestry practices and contribute to sustainable forest management.

The IJFE’s scope includes operations related to production and supply of forest biomass to industry or other users, but excludes typically the industrial manufacturing processes (e.g. sawmilling).

The scope applies on all kinds of forest management (e.g. short and long rotation; uneven-aged and even-aged) and all uses of the forest biomass (e.g. lumber, pulp and paper, energy and other uses).

Examples of topics typically covered by the IJFE are: tree harvesting, processing and transportation; stand establishment, protection and tending; operations planning and control; machine design, management and evaluation; forest access planning and construction; human factors engineering; and, education and training.

If there are uncertainties about if a manuscript might fall within the IJFE’s scope, please contact the Editor.

For manuscripts related to the industrial manufacturing processes, we recommend authors to consider publication with the Forest Products Journal.

Due to the booming interest in using forest biomass for energy purposes, the IJFE especially welcomes papers addressing such issues.

 

Section Policies

Articles

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Technical Notes

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Book Reviews

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Tell us about your organization

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Technical Note

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Peer Review Process

All submitted manuscript undergo an initial screening by the editorial team. If passing that step, IJFE applies a a double-blind peer review process, in which all manuscripts will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. The final evaluation rests with the Editor. The typical period of time allowed for reviews are 3 weeks. However, the administrative handling of the review process adds to this, so authors should expect notification on the review within 2 months after the date of a confirmed submission.

Reviewed manuscripts are graded in one of three categories; "acceptable pending revision", "not acceptable in its present form" and "not acceptable". For "acceptable pending revision", the authors are asked to revise the manuscript according to the reviewers' and editor's comments. If comments are adequatly addressed, the manuscript will be accepted. One or all of the original reviewer evaluate the revised manuscript. Depending on the measures taken by the autors, it might require additional revision(s) before final acceptance.

For "Not acceptable in its present form", the manuscript is judged as interesting and having a core of scientific soundness. However, it is considered to require substantial revisions before being in a publishable format. Authors are, therefore, encouraged to revise according to the reviewers' and the editor's comments and to resubmit to IJFE. Such a resubmission will be considered as a new submission and might be sent to new reviewers.

"Not acceptable" manuscripts are refused. Most often this is due to shortcomings in the scientific methods, with a lack of alignment between experimental design and the study's objective being a common reason for the refusal.

Publishing in proceedings and IJFE?

Conferences are good opportunities to disseminate research, and conference participation is therefore encourage by the IJFE. However, IJFE only publishes previously non-published research, so material already fully reported in conference proceedings will not be considered for publication.

Ideally, the reviewing and publishing process would be so fast that all conference presentations and proceedings could be based on peer-reviewed articles. However, there will always be cases where the presentation might precede a publication in IJFE.

Therefore, authors who consider publishing the same material in a conference proceeding and later in IJFE are advised to ensure that the proceeding does not constitute more than a minor part (e.g. an extended abstract) of the submitted manuscript. However, given that most of the manuscript is unpublished material, the manuscript will not be discriminated from consideration if it has a table or figure already published in a proceeding. Please note that it is mainly the content of the Result section that is sensitive to prior publication. 

Articles that have been partly presented in proceedings prior to IJFE publication should contain information about it. Thus, authors should provide such text in the article's Acknowledgement section (e.g. “An earlier and summarized version of this article was presented at the Conference name in Place,  Date.” ).

In some cases conference organizers invite full papers for consideration of publishing in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal. In these cases, it is especially important for the authors that are not selected to the peer-review publishing to ensure that their full paper are not published in the proceeding – if they would like to have it considered for publication in IJFE. Instead, the full paper should either be revised to an extended abstract or withdrawn completely.

Please contact the Editor if there are any uncertainties about these matters.