Reviewer Guidelines
Peer review is essential to ensuring the quality and integrity of scholarly publishing. Reviewers play a vital role in helping editors make informed decisions and in assisting authors to improve their work.
Duties and Responsibilities
Peer review assists the editor in making editorial decisions and helps authors improve their manuscripts. Reviews must be objective, constructive, evidence-based, respectful, and focused on the scholarly work.
Confidentiality. Manuscripts and associated files are confidential. Reviewers must not share, reproduce, quote, use, or discuss them outside the authorised review process.
Alertness to ethical issues. Reviewers should inform the editor of suspected plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabricated or manipulated data, unethical research, undisclosed conflicts, or substantial overlap with other work.
Before Accepting a Review
Accept an invitation only when the manuscript falls within your subject or methodological expertise, you can complete the review within the requested period, and no conflict of interest compromises impartiality.
- Check that you possess suitable expertise.
- Plan to return the report within the standard target of 14 days.
- Confirm that confidentiality requirements can be met.
- Decline promptly if these conditions are not satisfied.
Conflicts of Interest and Ethical Considerations
Decline the review when recent collaboration, institutional proximity, personal or family relationships, financial interests, academic competition, or prior involvement in the research could affect—or reasonably appear to affect—independence.
Reviewers must not contact authors directly. Potential ethical concerns belong in confidential comments to the editor and should be described precisely without making unsupported accusations.
Confidentiality and AI Use
Do not upload manuscripts, figures, data, review notes, or identifying information to public generative-AI systems or other external automated services. Reviewers remain personally responsible for the accuracy, reasoning, tone, and confidentiality of their reports.
Review Criteria
Evaluate the title, abstract, introduction, literature review, conceptual framework, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, tables, figures, references, ethical declarations, and overall contribution. Assess whether claims follow from the evidence, methods are sufficiently transparent, limitations are acknowledged, and the manuscript fits the journal’s aims and scope.
Preparing the Review
Begin with a concise summary of the research question, approach, and principal contribution. Distinguish major concerns from minor corrections. Number comments, identify the relevant section or page, explain why each major issue matters, and suggest realistic improvements without rewriting the paper for the authors.
Provide separate confidential comments to the editor when needed. Comments to authors should never disclose the recommendation or contain insulting, discriminatory, or personal language.
Editorial Recommendations
- Accept
- Suitable for publication without substantive revision.
- Minor Revision
- Limited changes are required.
- Major Revision
- Substantial theoretical, methodological, analytical, or presentational changes are required.
- Reject and Resubmit
- Fundamental redevelopment is required before a new submission could be considered.
- Reject
- The manuscript is not suitable for publication in the journal.
The editor makes the final decision after considering the reports and the manuscript as a whole.
Review Process
After editorial screening, manuscripts are normally assigned to at least two independent reviewers. Revised manuscripts may return to the original reviewers, be evaluated by new reviewers, or be assessed directly by the editor depending on the nature of the revision.
Reviewer Checklist
- I have appropriate expertise and sufficient time.
- I have disclosed all actual or potential conflicts of interest.
- I have kept the manuscript and review confidential.
- I have not contacted the authors or shared files externally.
- I have assessed every major manuscript component and relevant ethical concern.
- My comments distinguish major issues from minor corrections.
- My recommendation is supported by the review.
- I have not uploaded the manuscript to a public AI system.