Peer Review Policy

Newly submitted manuscripts will first be screened by the main Editors. Manuscripts may be rejected at this stage if they are of insufficient quality, outside the scope of the journal or they are considered not original. Manuscripts that do meet the minimal requirements for publication are assigned to one of the main Editors, who sends the manuscript out for review. Reviewers are selected by the main Editors on the basis of their expertise, their availability, and such as to avoid possible conflicts of interest. A reviewer is asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically sound, original, relevant, clear, whether it correctly references previous work, and whether it falls within the scope of the journal.

All research articles in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and anonymized refereeing by at least two anonymous referees. The acceptance or rejection of articles will be decided by the editorial boards based on the review results supplied by the reviewers. There are no communications between authors and editors concerning the rejection decision. Authors whose papers are rejected will be informed with the reasons for the rejection.

All papers are fully peer-reviewed. We only publish articles that have been reviewed and approved by highly qualified researchers with expertise in a field appropriate for the article. We used double-blind peer-reviewing process. To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this journal, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc. With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file.

  1. For Microsoft 2003 and previous versions, and Macintosh versions of Word Under the File menu select: Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.

  2. For MacIntosh Word 2008 (and future versions) : Under the File menu select "Properties." > Under the Summary tab remove all of the identifying information from all of the fields. > Save the File.

  3. For Microsoft 2007 (Windows) : Click on the office button in the upper-left hand corner of the office application > Select "Prepare" from the menu options > Select "Properties" for the "Prepare" menu options > Delete all of the information in the document property fields that appear under the main menu options > Save the document and close the document property field section.

  4. For Microsoft 2010 (Windows) :Under the File menu select "Prepare for sharing." > Click on the "Check for issues" icon > click on "inspect document" icon > 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 indicated 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," which you will click to remove the document properties and personal information from the document.

  5. For PDF files :With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.

Detailed information about the flow for the manuscript submission (author) to the acceptance by the editor is shown in the following figure :

In short, the steps are:

  1. Manuscript Submission (by author) (route 1)
  2. Manuscript Check and Selection (by manager and editors) (route 2). Editors have a right to directly accept, reject, or review.
  3. Manuscript Reviewing Process (by reviewers) (route 3-4)
  4. Notification of Manuscript Acceptance, Revision, or Rejection (by editor to author based on reviewers comments) (route 5)
  5. Paper Revision (by author)
  6. Revision Submission based on Reviewer Suggestion (by author) with similar flow to point number 1. (route 1)
  7. If reviewer seems to be satisfied with revision, notification for acceptance (by editor). (route 6)
  8. Galley proof and publishing process  (route 7 and 8)

The steps point number 1 to 5 is considered as 1 round of peer-reviewing process (see gray area in the figure). And, our reviewing process at least goes through 2 round of reviewing process. The journal editor or editorial board considers the feedback provided by the peer reviewers and arrives at a decision. The following are the most common decisions:

  1. accept without any changes (acceptance): the journal will publish the paper in its original form
  2. accept with minor revisions (acceptance): the journal will publish the paper and asks the author to make small corrections
  3. accept after major revisions (conditional acceptance ): the journal will publish the paper provided the authors make the changes suggested by the reviewers and/or editors
  4. revise and resubmit (conditional rejection): the journal is willing to reconsider the paper in another round of decision making after the authors make major changes
  5. reject the paper (outright rejection): the journal will not publish the paper or reconsider it even if the authors make major revisions.