The Peer Review Process
Who reviews your submission
A section editor makes an initial assessment of the submission and decides whether it is suitable for peer review.
The submission is assessed on its:
- contributions to the field
- fit with the journal’s scope
- compliance with our guidelines.
We run all submissions through an automated plagiarism check.
The section editor requests two reviews from two independent scholars. They review the submission for clarity, validity, and sound methodology. We give peer reviewers a form to complete. This is to ensure they assess every aspect of the submission against our guidelines.
To uphold our editorial standards, we will only consider submissions for publication if we receive two positive reviews by experts in the relevant field.
Overall editorial responsibility rests with the journal's editors-in-chief, who are supported by an expert international editorial board.
What to expect
The peer review usually takes 2-3 months, although it can take longer in exceptional cases.
Based on the reviewer reports, and in consultation with the managing editor, the section editor will make a recommendation for either rejection, minor or major revisions, or acceptance.
The editors may request minor copyediting revisions if your submission is successful. This is to meet all editorial guidelines.
We are unable to give feedback or advice before you submit. However, we ask reviewers to give formative feedback, even if they do not consider a submission suitable for publication.
How to prepare for a double-blind peer review
To ensure the integrity of the review process, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other.
This means that both authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) need to check two things:
First, the authors have deleted their names from the text. In the references and footnotes, they should use ‘Author’ and year instead of the author's name, article title or any other identifying data.
Second, authors have removed any names from the document's properties.
For PDFs:
Remove the names from 'Document Properties' under 'File' on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.
For Macintosh versions of Word:
Under the 'Tools' menu, select 'Protect Document' > Remove personal information from file on save > Save.
For Windows versions of Word:
Under the 'File' menu, select 'Check for Issues' > 'Inspect Document'
Uncheck all of the checkboxes except ‘Document Properties and Personal information’.
Run the document inspector, which will then do a search of the document properties and indicate if any document property fields contain any information. If the document inspector finds that some of the document properties contain information, it will notify you and give you the option to 'Remove all'. Select this to remove the document properties and personal information from the document.