Notes and Queries is a very famous and very long-running humanities journal, noted for its pioneering question-and-answer format. It's spun off a number of regional editions, a series of anthologies, and given rise to countless imitators.
I'd like to know whether (and if so, which types of) contributions to Notes and Queries are peer-reviewed. The journal's own website is silent on the matter—the only reference I can find to the review process is a short statement in the guidance for contributors that professional editing can help non-native speakers of English "ensure that the academic content of [their] paper is fully understood by journal editors and reviewers" (emphasis mine—and note that this statement refers only to "reviewers", not "peer reviewers"). And third-party sources give conflicting or incomplete information on the journal's peer-reviewed status. For example:
- The journal index of the MLA International Bibliography lists Notes and Queries as peer-reviewed, but doesn't indicate whether this applies to all types of submissions. (Maybe only the peer-reviewed submissions get indexed.)
- Various author-contributed reports on the English Literature Journals page of the Humanities Journals Wiki mention a (sometimes lengthy) review process for submissions, but they never mention whether this is peer review or editorial review.
- An informal but fairly lengthy review of Notes and Queries by Richard Rohlin (then a graduate student at Signum University) states that the journal is not peer-reviewed.
So what's the story here? Notes and Queries clearly has some sort of review process, but is it peer review? And if so, which of its four types of contributions (Notes, Queries, Replies, and Reviews) are peer-reviewed?
