In-House Quality-Check: Initially, all the new submissions are checked by our editorial staff for content related criteria such as
- Declaration of any potential competing interests
- Plagiarism-check
- Appropriate suitability of the article to the mentioned article type
- Determining whether the topic is within the scope of the journal
- Evaluating adherence of manuscript to word limits
- Supplementary material
- Ethical considerations
- Appropriate references, side headings, keywords, figures and figure legends, tables wherever mentioned
- Quality of images
- Proper understanding of language etc.
Assigning of Manuscript to Sectional Editor: Once the manuscript successfully passes through quality check, it is assigned to Sectional Editor, the corresponding subject area expert. The role of sectional editor is:
- To decide whether the paper must be sent to peer-review: Sectional editors make their initial decision based on the outstanding scientific importance of work and the results that seem novel. Papers are also assessed for originality, scientific quality, clarity of presentation, and conciseness. Scientific quality and significance have a higher weight than the other criteria. For any possible amendments, paper will be sent back to author. Sectional editors may seek advice from scientific advisors and editorial colleagues to make initial decision.
- To assign the manuscript to reviewers: Once the decision has been made to peer-review the paper, the choice of referees is made by the sectional editor. Most papers are sent to two or three referees. Referees are chosen based on their experience in assessing related submissions and their ability to evaluate the technical aspects of the manuscript fully and fairly. The corresponding author is notified by e-mail when the sectional editor decides to send the paper for review. The identity of the reviewers remains anonymous.
Peer-Review of the Manuscript: Our rigorous peer review not only evaluates the content, but also roots out errors of fact or concept and provokes discussion that will lead to new research activity. Our step by step process of Peer-Review is detailed below:
- Step 1: Reviewers are asked to read the manuscript very carefully and provide constructive feedback. Reviewers evaluate manuscripts on the basis of their originality, novelty, accuracy, importance, interdisciplinary interest, and evidence-based conclusions. After thorough review of the manuscript, referees make one of the decisions listed below:
- Accept without any changes: The journal will publish the paper in its original form.
- Accept with minor revisions: The journal will publish the paper after making minor corrections suggested by reviewers.
- Accept with major revisions / Revise and resubmit: The journal will publish the paper provided the authors make the changes suggested by the reviewers and/or editors.
- Reject and resubmit (Authors need to rework): The journal is willing to reconsider the paper in another round of decision making after the authors make major changes.
- Reject: The journal will not publish the paper or reconsider it even if the authors make major revisions.
Reviewers write suggestions for revision and give their helpful advice to the authors about how to improve the manuscript. On the other hand, reviewers send their summary evaluations to the editors and advise them whether to publish it or not.
- Step 2: After review, in accord with suggestions made by the reviewers, reviewers’ comments will be e-mailed to the author.
- Step 3: Authors must make specific changes in response to each reviewer comment and must submit the revised manuscript. The changes made must be highlighted in the revised manuscript. A cover letter/response letter must accompany the revised manuscript with point-by-point responses to the reviewers’ comments. If the author does not respond to the reviewer comments within six weeks, the paper is considered to be withdrawn.
- Step 4: Revised manuscripts are usually sent for re-review. The journal does not give any guarantee on acceptance of revised manuscripts as in few cases, if the improvements are not sufficient or if new issues arise, revised articles are rejected.
- Step 5: Authors are notified by E-mail when a manuscript has or has not been accepted for publication.
Copyediting of Accepted Papers: Finally, once the paper is accepted, it undergoes an in-house evaluation for quality, entirety and format. Manuscript is copy-edited by journal's subeditors, to ensure maximum clarity and reach. The role of sub-editors is to edit the language for maximum clarity and ensure that the length of the paper, terminology, and notation conform to APA Manual style. They also ensure that the figures and tables are clear and will fit in the space available.
Once the article passes all the above steps, it is published Online.