Guidelines for Reviewers

1.General Peer-Review and Editorial Procedure
2.Invitation to Review
3.Potential Conflicts of Interests
4.Confidentiality and Anonymity

General Peer-Review and Editorial Procedure

This journal operates a single anonymized review process. All submissions will be initially assessed by the Publisher for suitability for the journal. Submissions deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the scientific quality of the manuscript. The Academic Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding the acceptance or rejection of articles. The Academic Editor's decision is final.

Invitation to Review

Manuscripts submitted to SCIEPublish journals are sent to at least two experts for peer review. Reviewers will make an evaluation based on the paper quality, and recommend whether or not they believe the manuscript should be accepted revised, or rejected by the journal.

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.

Potential Conflicts of Interests

We ask reviewers to notify the editorial office if they have a conflict of interest, that could affect the review report positively or negatively. The editorial office will check it before invitations, but we thank the reviewers for their cooperation on this matter. Conflicts of Interests don’t contain the situation in which reviewers are invited to assess a manuscript they previously reviewed for another journal. In this case, reviewers can feel free to inform us if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

Confidentiality and Anonymity

The confidentiality of the manuscript content should be kept strictly by the reviewers.

SCIEPublish journals operate blind peer review. Reviewers should be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors. SCIEPublish journals offer authors the possibility to publish review reports with their paper and for reviewers to sign their open review reports, however this will only be done at publication with your express permission. If this is the case, it will be noted in the message inviting you to review. In all other cases, review reports are considered confidential and will only be disclosed with the explicit permission of the reviewer.