Peer Review Process
Detailed Peer Review Process
The peer review process of manuscripts in the journal is completely electronic through an online manuscript management system.
Each manuscript received after submission will undergo an initial internal review by the editorial team to assess for appropriateness of the manuscript for the journal, whether it is within the scope of the journal, the word count, appropriateness of figures and tables according to journal guidelines and ethical approval. If the paper is found to be inappropriate for the journal or inadequate in the information, figures, and tables, it is returned to the Author(s) through the corresponding author either for revision and resubmission or outright rejection.
When the paper is found to have met the editorial criteria and within the scope of the journal, it will be anonymized in terms of the authors and the institutions it will undergo an external peer review by at least two reviewers who are specialists in the area of the article. The reviewers are not to be from the same institution as the author(s) and would declare any conflict of interest if any. The reviewers are usually pulled from the pool of reviewers in the journal data of reviewers.
The reviewers are to accept or decline to review the manuscript within one (1 ) week and when they decline, the paper is sent to another reviewer who accepts to review the manuscript. The reviewers have a window of 2 weeks to critically review the manuscript in terms of :
- Appropriateness of title
- Completeness of the abstract
- Scientific validity of the paper
- Clarity of presentation
- Relevance to readers
- Any new message and contribution to the body of knowledge from the paper
- Word constructs and syntax correctness
- Plagiarism check
- Adequacy of references and their proper citations according to the Vancouver referencing style
- Correctness of Statistical inferences
The Editor may request that it be reviewed by a statistician. Reviewers are requested to treat papers as confidential and not to copy manuscripts.
The reviewers are to make marked modifications in the manuscript and also submit comments to the editors and the author(s) based on the merits of the comments. The final remarks of the reviewers shall be in these categories
- Accept without correction
- Accept with minor correction
- Review the manuscript and resubmit
- Rejected
Journal Acknowledgment of receipt of the manuscript will be sent to the corresponding author.
Comments from the reviewers are also sent to the corresponding author.
For papers requiring minor and major corrections, the authors are to revise accordingly and resubmit for review.
In the case of re-review, the previous reviewers may be contacted if available or the manuscript would be sent to another reviewer. Manuscripts under review can cycle up to three times to ensure authors effect the corrections before acceptance of the manuscript for publication.
Upon acceptance, the author(s) are communicated to and asked to proceed to pay for the article processing charges. On acknowledging the article processing charges, the manuscript shall be moved for technical checks after which the article is sent to the Corresponding author for proof before publication.
Papers not accepted will normally be returned to the author with or without reviewers' comments.