Guidelines for Peer Reviewers

PEER REVIEW PROCESS

Guidelines for Peer Reviewers

The peer review process depends to a large extent on trust, and requires that everyone involved behaves responsibly and ethically. Peer reviewers play a central and critical part in the peerreview process and the institution had formulated Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers to set out the basic principles and standards to which all peer reviewers should adhere during the peerreview process. The reviewer should acknowledge that peer review is largely a reciprocal endeavour and undertake to carry out their fair share of reviewing and in a timely manner It is hoped they will provide helpful guidance to reviewers.

Basic principles to which peer reviewers should adhere

Peer reviewers should:

• Keep the peer review process confidential. They must not share information or correspondence about a manuscript with anyone outside of the peer review process without the explicit permission of the editor.
• Not allow their reviews to be influenced by the origins of a manuscript, by the nationality, religious or political beliefs, gender or other characteristics of the authors, or by commercial considerations.
• When conducting a review, reviewers should evaluate a manuscript for

• Adequacy of the rationale for the study or paper
• Accuracy and scope of the literature review
• Appropriateness of research design, data analysis, and interpretation of results for research articles
• Organization
• Clarity
• Overall significance of the work

• Provide a constructive, comprehensive, evidenced, and appropriately substantial peer review report. 
• call to the journal editor’s attention any significant similarity between the manuscript under consideration and any published paper or submitted manuscripts of which they are aware.
• Recommend which aspects of the work should be improved, when revision of the manuscript is suggested: Please ensure your comments are detailed so that the authors may correctly understand and address the points you raise.
• Make sure you offer some constructive feedback, even if your recommendation ends up being to reject. Your review should ultimately help the author improve the paper.
• Justify your recommendation with concrete evidence and specific examples.
• Return the reports within the specified deadline or inform the Editor as soon as possible if they are not able to do so. Reviewer reports can be submitted via online submission system.