A submitted manuscript is critically reviewed in the following steps:

(1) The Editorial Board screens the manuscript based on the journal formatting guidelines, assigns a review number, and notifies receipt of the manuscript to the author(s).

(2) The Editorial Board appoints two peer reviewers among experts who are specialized in the same or closely-related field as the manuscript author(s) as evidenced by at least 300% of publications within recent three years. If there is no well-qualified person, the Board may ease the norms for reviewer selection by unanimous consent.

(3) Reviewes should submit review reports to the Board within two weeks after receiving the review requests. If the Board does not receive a review report from a reviewer within the given period, it may reselect a reviewer based upon Clause (2) above

(4) A review report consists of two parts: (i) a reviewer’s recommendation and (ii) a review summary. In the first part (i), the reviewer evaluates the manuscript according to the following review criteria and assigns a letter grade, A, B, C, or D (A being the highest and D the lowest) with respect to each criterion.

1) Does the title match the substance of the article?

2) Are the organization and argumentation of the article logically structured?

3) Is the method adopted in the article appropriate and adequate?

4) Is the analysis superior to the previous ones? Does the analysis bring new insights to the field?

5) Are references cited appropriately?

6) Does the English abstract summarize the substance of the article well?

7) Does the article accord closely with the goals and objectives of Altai hakpo? 
Based on this, the reviewer makes an overall recommendation by giving the manuscript one of the following four rating categories: ‘Accept’, ‘Accept with revisions’, ‘Resubmit’, ‘Reject’. 
In the second part (ii), the reviewer freely describes his/her evaluations and suggestions on the manuscript.

(5) After a full consideration of all the peer reviewers’ reports, the Editorial Board makes the final decision to accept or reject the manuscript for publication. A suggestion made by each reviewer is assigned a score of 4 for ‘Accept’, 3 for ‘Accept with revisions’, 2 for ‘Resubmit’, and 0 for ‘Reject’. The final editorial decision is made by the sum of the two suggestion scores as follows:

The sum of the two reviewers' suggestion scores	Final decision
8	'Accept'
6-7	'Accept with revisions'
4-5	'Resubmit'
less than 3	'Reject'

(6) The editorial decision must be notified to the author(s) immediately.

(7) In cases of ‘Accept with revisions’ or ‘Resubmit’, the author(s) must resubmit a revised manuscript with a revision report to the Editorial Board by the date designated by the Board. Revised manuscripts that were initially in the category ‘Resubmit’ should be sent to the same reviewer(s) for evaluation to go through the review process (2) to (5).

(8) The author(s) may make a counterargument on the request of revision made by the reviewer(s). If this is the case, the Editorial board appoints an examiner for final decision. After a careful examination of all the documents including the manuscript and the review reports, the examiner makes a suggestion for final decision to the Editorial Board. The examiner may request a revision of the manuscript and, if this is the case, will review the revision him/herself.

(9) Upon completion of the whole review process, the Editorial Board makes the final approval on the selection of papers to be published in the journal.

(10) The Editor-in-Chief may request a revision of the format for the accepted papers.

(11) The Editorial Board guarantees the anonymity of both the authors and the reviewers.