PAPER SELECTION AND PUBLISHING PROCESS GUIDANCE FOR AUTHORS AND REVIEWERS

• For Authors

1 Submission Acknowledgement

When you submit a manuscript online, you will receive a submission acknowledgement letter sent by the online system automatically. For email submission, the editor or editorial assistant sends an e-mail confirmation to the submission’s author within one to three working days. If you fail to receive this confirmation, please check your bulk email box or contact the editorial assistant.

2 Basic Review

The editor or editorial assistant determines whether the manuscript fits the journal’s focus and scope. Next a check for the similarity rate is done using iThenticate. Any manuscripts out of the journal’s scope or containing plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, are rejected.

3 Decision Is Made

The decision to accept or reject an article is based on the suggestions of reviewers. If differences of opinion occur between reviewers, the editor-in-chief will weigh all comments and arrive at a balanced decision based on all comments, or a second round of peer review may be initiated.

4 Peer Review

We use a double-blind system for peer review; both reviewers’ and authors’ identities remain anonymous. The submitted manuscript will be reviewed by at least two experts: one editorial staff member as well as one to three external reviewers. The review process may take 4 to 9 working days.

• For Reviewers

All of the papers submitted to the journal are written by the researchers. As such we ask that all peer reviewers assess the papers as they would a paper for an academic journal. We do however ask that the feedback the reviewers give on the paper be as detailed as possible so that the student is absolutely clear about the work they need to do to get their paper to a publishable standard or so that they have clear, constructive feedback explaining why their paper has been rejected.
 
We have put together a checklist for reviewers to consider during their review and we also provide a structured form to house the feedback from each reviewer. The peer-review process is double blind and therefore all comments are completely confidential. Within the Reviewer's Checklist we ask that each reviewer considers a number of criteria. We ask the reviewers to consider if the paper is important, if the work is original and adds to what is already in the published literature, if there is a clear message, if the paper is clearly presented and if there is good methodological integrity, including appropriate consideration of ethics. We also ask reviewers to look at the detail of the paper including the appropriateness of the title and abstract, whether the research question is clearly defined and appropriately answered, the overall design of the study and description of method and whether or not the paper answers the research question. Finally the reviewers are asked to look at the usefulness and relevance of any tables, images, links or other additional data, to ensure that all references are present and complete and that the interpretation and conclusions are warranted by and focused on the data.