We sincerely thank all of the reviewers who contribute their time and expertise to evaluate the manuscripts submitted to SCIEPublish journals, and ultimately, help advance scientific communication and open access research.
Criteria for Publication
SCIEPublish journals welcome manuscripts with a specialized focus, as well as feasibility studies and negative results. A manuscript for acceptance must be:
- scientifically and technically sound;
- with appropriate methodology and presentation;
- Providing adequate data support for conclusions.
Model of Peer Review
SCIEPublish journals operate a rigorous and thorough single-anonymous peer review, which means the editors and reviewers have access to the identities of the authors, but the identities of the editors and reviewers are not revealed to the authors. For more details about peer review process, please refer to peer review policy.
Benefits of Reviewers
- A reviewer recognition certificate is provided at request;
- Excellent reviewers have the chance to be promoted to Reviewer Board Members through the approval by the Editor(s)-in-Chief;
- Reviewers may create a profile on Publons and have their reviewing activity automatically added for participating journals. Profiles on Publons can also be integrated with ORCID.
Responsibility of Reviewers
- Consider becoming reviewers as a part of your professional responsibilities, while you benefit from the peer review process as authors.
- Declare all potential competing or conflicting interests with all co-authors of the work before start your review. You should not agree to review, in situations where any of the co-authors and you are in the same institution, or have been collaborated within the past five years. Please contact Editorial Office if you are unsure about a potential competing interest that may prevent you from reviewing.
- Respond to a review invitation in a timely manner, agree or not. You may agree to review only if you feel qualified and ensure that you can return the review within the proposed or mutually agreed time frame. In cases where you need more time to finish the review, inform Editorial Office of an extension. You are welcome to recommend other potential reviewers who are relevant with this manuscript;
- Follow the confidentiality of the peer review process as well as the information about the manuscript and co-authors;
- Report to Editorial Office in case any potential research or publication misconduct occur, like plagiarism or research ethics violations, etc.
- Keep your review objective and constructive to help the authors to improve their manuscript, avoid being hostile or inflammatory;
- Provide fair, honest, and unbiased assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript during the peer review process.
Invitation to Review
When Reviewers are invited to assess manuscripts submitted to SCIEPublish Journals, they are asked to address the following points:
- accept or decline any invitations quickly, based on the manuscript title and abstract;
- recommend alternative reviewers when declining an invitation;
- request an extension when requiring more time to complete a report;
When Reviewers agree to assess manuscripts submitted to SCIEPublish Journals, they are asked to check the following points:
- If the results are original, timely, and significantly advance the knowledge.
- If the background information is thoroughly described.
- If the sufficient data and rigorous analysis are presented.
- If the manuscript has impact on the relevant scientific communities.
- If the manuscript is written in proper English and well organized.
- If the figures are necessary, adequate, well-presented, and clearly labeled.
- If the reference list has inappropriate self-citations.
Usually, there are two rounds of peer reviewing work for our reviewers before the final decision step:
The first round of peer review: Reviewers are invited to review the original manuscript and provide a review report as detailed as possible. We encourage reviewers to provide all the revision comments at this step.
The second round of peer review: Once the manuscript is revised and resubmitted, the reviewers would be invited again to check if the manuscript has improved enough based on the first round of review comments.
It would be seldom for reviewers to be invited for the third round of peer review. However, this would happen if the manuscript is not revised thoroughly while reviewers would like to read the revised version again.
Rating Standards of Peer Review
During the peer review process, reviewers are expected to rate the following aspects:
- Novelty: Is the manuscript novelty enough?
- Scientific Soundness: Is the manuscript scientifically sound and not misleading?
- Quality: Does the manuscript give a concise and comprehensive view of the topic?
- Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the journal?
- Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work?
Review reports should include:
- A brief summary (one short paragraph): outlining the aim of the paper and its main contributions.
- Broad comments highlighting areas of strength and weakness. Comments regarding deficiencies in the submitted work should be constructive and their judgment explained specifically enough so authors are able to respond and improve their article. The comments should be listed one by one clearly (preferably numbered).
- Concluding comments summarizing reviewers' final recommendation and explain the reason to Editor only, but not to author.
Note that if the review report does not meet our quality standards, you may be asked to revise the report, or the report may be discarded.
Overall Recommendation
Reviewers are expected to provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript as follows (do not include this recommendation in the comments to the authors):
- Accept in Present Form: The paper is accepted without any further changes.
- Accept after Minor Revision: The manuscript is in principle accepted after a slight revision based on the reviewer's comments.
- Reconsider after Major Revision: The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The manuscript would benefit from substantial changes such as expanded data analysis, or rewriting sections, or widening of the literature review, etc. The author needs to provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer's comments cannot be revised.
- Reject: The manuscript has serious flaws in data or experimental design or makes no original contribution, etc. The manuscript is rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.
Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal Editors, not to the authors.