During preparation for peer review, the Reviewers should:
- Promptly respond to an offer to write a review, especially if they are not going to write it;
- If they do not know the subject of research well enough to write a review, state it directly, and if they can only evaluate some part of the manuscript, describe the boundaries of the area in which they have sufficient knowledge;
- Agree to review the manuscript only if they are confident that they will be able to provide the review within the proposed or jointly agreed time frame, promptly notifying the journal if they need an extension;
- Not agree to review the manuscript just to read it, without the intention of preparing a review;
- Refuse a review if they feel they cannot make an impartial and fair assessment;
- Refuse a review if they participated in any work related to the manuscript, or in the research described in it;
- Refuse a review if they do not agree with the rules of reviewing adopted in the journal.
During peer review, the Reviewers should:
- Notify the journal immediately and seek advice if they discovered any conflict of interest that was not noticed when they agreed to take the article for review, or any other circumstances that prevent them from forming a fair and impartial assessment of the article;
- Carefully read the manuscript, supporting materials (eg, guidelines for the reviewer, required ethical guidelines and policies, files with attachments) and journal instructions, referring to the journal if any questions arise and requesting missing information necessary for a quality review;
- Notify the journal as soon as possible if they find that they do not have sufficient knowledge to evaluate all aspects of the manuscript, without waiting for the submission of the review, as this will unduly delay the review process;
- Not to publicize any details of the manuscript and review;
- Immediately notify the journal if circumstances arise that prevent them from preparing a review in a timely manner, providing an accurate estimate of the time they will need if the journal does not appoint another reviewer instead;
- Immediately notify the journal if they discover errors in the work, or they are concerned about the ethics of the work, or they become aware of a significant similarity between the manuscript and another document, or they suspect that bad faith has occurred during the research or submission of the manuscript to the journal; at the same time, reviewers should keep their concerns secret and not further investigate the circumstances of the case, unless the journal itself turns to them for help;
- Ensure that their review is based on the quality of the work and is not influenced (for better or for worse) by any personal, financial or other considerations, or intellectual preferences.
During the preparation of the review, the Reviewers should:
- Remember that the editor expects them to have knowledge of the subject area, common sense, and to provide an honest and fair assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the work and the manuscript;
- Follow the journal's instructions for the required feedback, and unless there is a compelling reason not to do so, provide such feedback;
- Provide objective and constructive peer review that can help authors improve their manuscript;
- Not allow derogatory personal comments or unfounded accusations;
- Clearly indicate which proposed additional research may support the conclusions reached in the peer-reviewed manuscript and may strengthen or expand the work;
- Ensure that the comments and recommendations addressed to the editor are in agreement with the report addressed to the authors;
- Keep in mind that confidential comments sent to the editor must not contain defamation or false accusations against authors, made in the belief that the authors will not see these comments.
Reviewers are expected to provide quality reviews which will be accurate and meaningful.
Quality reviews should be constructively critical and not underestimate the authors' research merit, even if negative. The reviewer should not disclose himself or his organization in the review text. The reviewer's recommendation to accept or reject the manuscript should not be included in comments to authors.
The standard review scheme is as follows:
- A thesis statement of the reviewed material in its own formulation (in this part, the reviewer should not quote the introduction or summary verbatim).
- An assessment of how qualitatively the related work is considered within the peer-reviewed material (by “related work”, the Editorial Board understands related publications, publications in the same subject area, and similar publications in the same edition). The reviewer can expect authors to refer to specific related materials they find in journal publications over the past 2-3 years.
- An assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the reviewed material. The reviewer should be careful when making constructive suggestions on how authors can develop or enhance these features of the material.
- A suggestion for specific corrections, such as data that is unclear or other errors.
- A brief overview of the general review and recommendations.
Reviewers are asked to provide detailed guidance to authors. The following range of questions will be useful when making recommendations:
- What is the contribution of the reviewed material to the subject area?
- Does the author explain the meaning of the reviewed material for the subject area?
- Is the material presented neatly and meaningfully?
- Does the introduction reveal the main thrust of the material being reviewed?
- Are the literature references relevant and complete? (The reviewer should provide a list of missing references.)
- If the material does not correspond to the accepted academic style, then why?
- If the material looks too expanded, how can it be shortened?
Reviewers are asked to provide any information that, in their opinion, will be useful to the author for familiarization, improvement of the material, or as an evidence part when pointing out the authors' mistakes.
Reviewers are asked to be substantive in critical comments about the author. If the reviewer finds that the results have already been published, he should provide links to earlier publications containing these or similar results. If the reviewer claims that the argumentation is incorrect or vague, then he indicates where and why. If the reviewer proposes to rewrite the document, then he should give specific suggestions as to which parts of the document should be removed, strengthened or changed, and, if possible, indicate how to do this. If the publication is accompanied by a multimedia attachment (usually a video), the reviewer comments on the attachment, in particular: is the attachment consistent with the content of the peer-reviewed material and does it improve the quality of the publication? If this is a video, what is its technical quality and is it free from licensing restrictions?
If the reviewer believes that additional material (equations, graphs, tables, etc.) needs to be added to the review, he can do it by attaching a .pdf file to the review. The reviewer is asked to indicate in his comments to the author that he has prepared a .pdf file with such additional material, since otherwise the authors may ignore it. The reviewer should keep in mind that if he attaches a paper version to the review, he must ensure that any information that identifies him is removed from there. The submission system does not do this instead of the reviewer, but provides links to the anonymizing procedure if the reviewer intends to upload attachments in comments addressed to the author.
The review template can be downloaded here.
