Peer Review Process

The Editors aim to provide prompt reviews to optimise the quality of the published papers. All submissions are initially assessed by the editor-in-chief and/or senior Deputy editors. Once an article has been accepted for peer review, it is assigned to an Associate Editor who will manage it through the peer review process.

A double blind review process is followed, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from each other throughout the review process. A majority of manuscripts will be sent to one or two reviewers, under the management of an editor assigned to the submission. Reviewers as experts in the field provide comments to authors and editors on the importance, originality and scientific merit of the manuscript and suggest changes which may improve the quality and validity of the manuscript. The review process itself takes approximately 4 – 6 weeks to complete but can change depending upon the quality of the manuscript submitted, reviewer’s response and time taken by the authors to submit the revised manuscript.

If the decision is for revision, the author is requested to address each comment by the reviewers, and submit a letter outlining their responses accompanying their revised manuscript. The assigned editor will re-evaluate the revisions and will either make a decision or send the manuscript for a second round of review, usually to the original set of reviewers.  Reviewers will be informed of the outcome of manuscripts which they have reviewed.

The Editor-in-Chief will have the final decision on any submitted manuscript.