Instruction for Reviewer

  1. Peer Review and Editorial Procedure.

    Peer review is an essential part of the publication process and it ensures that ETRJ maintains the highest quality standards for its published papers. All manuscripts submitted to our journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts. Immediately after submission, the journal’s Managing Editor will perform a technical pre-check of the manuscript. A suitable editorial adviser will be notified of the submission and invited to perform an editorial pre-check and recommend reviewers. The editorial editors can decide to continue with the peer review process, reject a manuscript, or request revisions before peer-review. In the case of continuing the peer review process, the Editorial Office will organize the peer review, which is performed by independent experts, and collect at least two review reports per manuscript. We ask authors for sufficient revisions (with a second round of peer review, when necessary) before a final decision is made. The final decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief. Accepted manuscripts are then copy-edited and English-edited internally. More details about the editorial process can be found editorial process.

  2. Reviewers’ Profile and Responsibilities

    The role of the reviewer is vital and bears a great responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the scholarly record. Every reviewer is expected to perform manuscript evaluation in a timely, transparent, and ethical manner, following the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines:

    The standard and blinded peer review process for ETRJ is: here.

    Reviewers should meet the following criteria:

    • Hold no conflicts of interest with any of the authors;
    • Should not come from the same institution as the authors;
    • Should not have published together with the authors in the last three years;
    • Hold a PhD;
    • Have relevant experience and have a proven publication record in the field of the submitted paper;
    • Are experienced scholars in the field of the submitted paper;

    • Hold an official and recognized academic affiliation.

      ETRJ strives for a rigorous peer review to ensure a thorough evaluation of each manuscript. This is a fundamental task for our reviewers. Reviewers who accept to review a manuscript are expected to:

    • Have the necessary expertise to judge the scientific quality of the manuscript;
    • Provide quality review reports and remain responsive throughout the peer review process;
    • Maintain standards of professionalism and ethics.

  3. Reviewers’ Benefits

    Reviewing is often an unseen and unrewarded task, despite being crucial. We are striving to recognize the efforts of all our reviewers.

    Reviewing for ETRJ bring the following benefits:

    • For every manuscript reviewed, the reviewer may receive a 25% of the article processing charges (APC).
    • The reviewers receive a personalized reviewer certificate;
    • The reviewers are eligible to be considered for the “Outstanding Reviewer Awards”.
    • The reviewers are included in the journal’s annual acknowledgment of reviewers if more than 50 reviewers assisted the journal in the previous year.
    • Excellent reviewers may be promoted to Reviewer Board Members (subject to approval by the Editor-in-Chief).

  4. General Guidelines for Reviewers

    The author will be required to submit three (3) names of possible reviewers on the submission of the manuscript. This is to assist the ETRJ to have a repository of possible reviewers. All these will be communicated to the reviewer through the email.

4.1 Invitation to Review

Manuscripts submitted to ETRJ are reviewed by two experts suggested by the academic editor during the preliminary check. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the external editor on whether a manuscript should be accepted, requires revisions, or should be rejected.

The reviewers shall be asked to:

  • accept or decline any invitations as soon as possible (based on the manuscript title and abstract);
  • suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must be declined;
  • request a deadline extension as soon as possible in case more time is required to provide a comprehensive report 4.2 Review Reports

The review report must be prepared in English language. We have listed some general instructions regarding the review report for your consideration below. To begin with, please consider the following guidelines:

  • Read the whole article as well as the supplementary material, if there is any, paying close attention to the figures, tables, data, and methods.
  • The report should critically analyze the article as whole but also specific sections and the key concepts presented in the article.
  • Please ensure comments are detailed so that the authors may correctly understand and address the points raise.
  • Reviewers must not recommend citation of work by themselves, close colleagues, another author, or the journal when it is not clearly necessary to improve the quality of the manuscript under review.
  • Reviewers must not recommend excessive citation of their work (self-citations), another author’s work (honorary citations) or articles from the journal where the manuscript was submitted as a means of increasing the citations of the reviewer/authors/journal. Reviewers can provide references as needed, but they must clearly improve the quality of the manuscript under review.
  • Please maintain a neutral tone and focus on providing constructive criticism that will help the authors improve their work. Derogatory comments are prohibited.
  • Reviewers are prohibited from using AI or AI-assisted tools (such as ChatGPT) to draft, edit, polish or review submissions in order to produce peer review reports. Reviewers are solely responsible for the content of their reports, and the utilization of AI or AI-assisted tools to assist any part of the report preparation process constitutes a breach of peer review confidentiality and comes with additional copyright, security and confidentiality risks.

  • If the review report does not meet our quality standards, the reviewer may be asked to revise the report, or the report may be discarded.

    Note that ETRJ follow several standards and guidelines, including those from the ICMJE (medical journals), CONSORT (trial reporting), TOP (data transparency and openness), PRISMA (systematic reviews and meta-analyses) and ARRIVE (reporting of in vivo experiments). Contact the Editorial Office for more details. Reviewers that are familiar with the guidelines should report any concerns experienced about the implementation.

    Review reports should contain the following:

    • A brief summary (one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper, its main contributions and strengths.
    • General concept comments
    • Article: highlighting areas of weakness, the testability of the hypothesis, methodological inaccuracies, missing controls, etc.
    • Review: commenting on the completeness of the review topic covered the relevance of the review topic, the gap in knowledge identified, the appropriateness of references, etc. These comments are focused on the scientific content of the manuscript and should be specific enough for the authors to be able to respond.
    • Specific comments: This refers to line numbers, tables or figures that point out inaccuracies within the text or sentences that are unclear. These comments should also focus on the scientific content and not on spelling, formatting or English language problems, as these can be addressed at a later stage by our internal staff.

    General questions to help guide your review report for research articles:

S/N Item Yes No
1 Is the manuscript clear, relevant for the field and presented in a well-structured manner?    
2 Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years) and relevant?    
3 Does manuscript include an excessive number of self-citations?    
4 Is the manuscript scientifically sound and is the experimental design appropriate to test the hypothesis?    
5 Are the manuscript’s results reproducible based on the details given in the methods section?    
6 Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate?    
7 Do the figures/tables/images/schemes properly show the data?    
8 Are the figures/tables/images/schemes easy to interpret and understand?    
9 Is the data interpreted appropriately and consistently throughout the manuscript?    
10 Is the manuscript’s follows APA style of citation and reference?    
11 Are the conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented?  

General questions to help guide your review report for review articles:

S/N Item Yes No
1 Is the review clear, comprehensive and of relevance to the field? Is a gap in knowledge identified?    
2 Was a similar review published recently and, if yes, is this current review still relevant and of interest to the scientific community?    
3 Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years) and relevant?    
4 Are any relevant citations omitted?    
5 Does it include an excessive number of self-citations?    
6 Is the manuscript’s follows APA style of citation and reference?    
7 Are the statements and conclusions drawn coherent and supported by the listed citations?    
8 Are the figures/tables/images/plate/schemes appropriate?    
9 Do they properly show the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand?  

4.3 Rating the Manuscript

During the manuscript evaluation, please rate the following aspects:

  • Novelty: Is the question original and well-defined? Do the results provide an advancement of the current knowledge?
  • Scope: Does the work fit the journal scope*?
  • Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses carefully identified as such?
  • Quality: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented appropriately? Are the highest standards for presentation of the results used?
  • Scientific Soundness: Is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Is the data robust enough to draw conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results? Is the raw data available and correct (where applicable)?
  • Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the journal? Will the paper attract a wide readership, or be of interest only to a limited number of people? (Please see the Aims and Scope of the journal.)
  • Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work advance the current knowledge? Do the authors address an important long-standing question with smart experiments? Do the authors present a negative result of a valid scientific hypothesis?
  • English Level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?

Manuscripts submitted to ETRJ should meet the highest standards of publication ethics:

  • Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.
  • Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse text from another source without appropriate citation.
  • The studies reported should have been carried out in accordance with generally accepted ethical research standards.

If the reviewer becomes aware of any scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behaviour related to the manuscript, he or she should raise these concerns with the in-house editor immediately.

4.4 Overall Recommendation

Please provide an overall recommendation for the next processing stage of the manuscript as follows:

  • Accept in Present Form: The paper can be accepted without any further changes.
  • Accept after Minor Revisions: The paper can in principle be accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.
  • Reconsider after Major Revisions: The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. A maximum of two rounds of major revision per manuscript is normally provided. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within ten days and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments. If the required revision time is estimated to be longer than 2 months, we will recommend that authors withdraw their manuscript before resubmitting so as to avoid unnecessary time pressure and to ensure that all manuscripts are sufficiently revised.
  • Reject: The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution and the paper may be rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal. Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal editors, not to the authors. Decisions on revisions, acceptance, or rejections must always be well justified.

4.5 Potential Conflicts of Interest The reviewer should declare any potential conflicts of interest or send an email to the journal Editorial Office if unsure of what constitutes a potential conflict of interest. Possible conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Reviewer works in the same faculty as one of the authors;
  • Reviewer is a co-author, collaborator, joint grant holder, or has any other academic link, with any of the authors within the past three years;
  • Reviewer has a close personal relationship, rivalry or antipathy to any of the authors;
  • Reviewer may in any way gain or lose financially from publication of the paper;
  • Reviewer has any other non-financial conflicts of interest (political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, intellectual, commercial or any other) with any of the authors. Reviewer should disclose any conflicts of interest that may be perceived as bias for or against the paper or authors. Please kindly note that when a reviewer is requested to assess a manuscript previously reviewed for another journal, this is not considered being a conflict of interest. In this case, reviewer should feel free to let the Editorial Office know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

4.6 Declaration of Confidentiality ETRJ operate single- or double-blind peer review editorial process. Until the article is published, reviewers should keep the content of the manuscript, including the Abstract, confidential. Reviewers should also be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors, either in their comments or in metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF format.