REVIEWER GUIDLINE

REVIEWER GUIDELINES

All papers submitted to ScienceEdu undergo a rigorous peer-review to ensure that they not only ﬁt into the journal’s scope but are of suﬃcient academic quality and novelty to appeal to our readers. As a reviewer, you will be required to uphold this standard.

These guidelines will help you understand your responsibilities as a reviewer, as well as your ethical obligations to both the journal and the authors. You will also be introduced to what you should be looking for in a manuscript, so that your review will be consistent with others requested by the journal. This is particularly important as all articles submitted to ScienceEdu should be evaluated on the same playing ﬁeld.

Your responsibilifies as a reviewer

As a reviewer, you will be responsible for reading the manuscript and evaluating its suitability for publication in ScienceEdu along with its scientiﬁc quality. You will be expected to provide constructive, impartial, unambiguous, and honest feedback to the authors, with the purpose of encouraging them to improve their manuscript.

In accordance with its commitment to the development of young scientists, ScienceEdu aims to see all authors who submit to the journal—regardless of whether they are accepted—improve both as aca- demic writers and researchers. As such, reviewer comments that in any way denigrate or discourage an author from re-submitting to this or another journal will not be tolerated. Reviews should be critical but not detrimental to accurate scientiﬁc communication.

Things to consider before agreeing to review a manuscript

Before you agree to review a manuscript, you should be certain that you have the necessary expertise and time to provide a critical evaluation of the article. You should ensure that:

The article matches your Log into your ScienceEdu account and read the manuscript’s abstract to determine whether your ﬁeld of expertise matches that of the manuscript.
You are able to both complete the review on time and dedicate the appropriate time to conducting a thorough A review should be completed within three weeks. If you do not think you can complete the review within this timeframe, please let the editor know. If possible, please also suggest an alternate reviewer. If you agree to review a manuscript, but later on ﬁnd yourself unable to complete it on time, please contact the editor as soon as possible.
You have no conﬂict of Determine whether there is any conﬂict of interest that may aﬀect your impartiality in evaluating the manuscript. If there is, you should contact the editor and immediately recuse yourself. If you were unable to detect any conﬂict before agreeing to the review request, but ﬁnd one during the review, simply contact the editor and explain why you cannot continue.

Reviewer ethics

ScienceEdu relies on the impartiality and discretion of reviewers, and as a reviewer, you are entrusted with conﬁdential material meant solely for critical evaluation. As such, we expect you to treat all documents and correspondence related to the review with the appropriate level of care.

Do not use any of the information therein for the advancement of your own research or to dis- credit another
Do not discuss any aspect of the manuscript with a third
Ensure that the information therein and details of the review process remain conﬁdential before, during, and after publication.
Maintain the integrity of the double-blind review Do not under any circumstances con- tact any of the authors to discuss their manuscript.
Be fair, honest, and objective in your evaluation of the
Declare a conﬂict of interest, and recuse yourself immediately if you believe your impartiality has been

Conducfing the review

1. ScienceEdu’s review procedure

ScienceEdu uses an online submission and peer review system. When a reviewer is requested to review a paper submitted to ScienceEdu, they will have a journal account created for them, through which they will be able to read the abstract and decide on whether to agree to review it.

If you have been requested to review a paper, simply log into your reviewer account, read the provided abstract, and indicate whether you agree to review it. If you decline to review the manuscript, please include the reason why, and if possible, suggest an alternate reviewer from a similar ﬁeld.

To ensure the integrity of the peer-review process, all further correspondence will be through this system, with the reviewer being given access to the full manuscript and provided with a review page to ﬁll out and submit. If you wish, you can also provide comments directly on the manuscript ﬁle, but be sure that all comments are made anonymously and focus on the content of the article, not its layout or formatting.

2. Basic criteria

A good review looks at both the overall quality of the manuscript and the accuracy and precision of its details. The former is informed by the later. When evaluating a manuscript for ScienceEdu, look at the following aspects:

Is the manuscript within ScienceEdu’s scope? How interesting will the article be to the journal’s readership?
Novelty of the Is the article suﬃciently novel and interesting? Does it add new knowledge? How original is the research?
Appropriateness of the Does the title accurately represent the content?

Content Does the article adhere to ScienceEdu’s standards? Is the research question an important one? Does the manuscript help to expand or further current research in its respective ﬁeld?
Is the description of the methodology informative, clear, and concise? Is the methodology of the research precise and properly conducted? How appropriate is the approach or experimental design?
Signiﬁcance of the Do the results have signiﬁcant implications for education and or society?
Appropriateness of tables, ﬁgures, and/or supplemental Is every ﬁgure/table necessary and correctly described? Is the supplementary material appropriate for the content?
Completeness of the How complete are the data?
Relevance of the Is the discussion relevant to the results and rest of the content? Have the authors appropriately discussed their results in the context of previous research?
Appropriateness of citations/references. Are all citations accounted for? Is there an appropriate amount of citations for the content (neither too few nor too many)?
Clarity of the How good is the English? Will ScienceEdu’s readership have trouble under- standing the content?
Adherence to ScienceEdu’s Does the manuscript adhere to the journal’s guidelines, such as the structure of the manuscript? Have tables and ﬁgures been submitted separately?
Adherence to correct scientiﬁc Are species names up-to-date and correctly spelled? Are technical terms used correctly?

3. Ethical considerafions

In addition to the above criteria, also pay attention to whether the manuscript contains instances of plagiarism, improper referencing, republication, or fraud. Things to look for:

Observe whether a portion of the manuscript has been copied from another work without giving appropriate credit. For example, text has been copied verbatim without a clear indication that it is a quote, text has been copied but not cited (suggesting that these are the authors’ own words/ideas), or some portion of the text has been copied without the permission of the original author. If you ﬁnd that a signiﬁcant part of the manuscript has been plagiarized, please contact the editor as soon as possible so we can take the appropriate actions.
Missing, incorrect, or incomplete references. All text, ﬁgures, tables, data, ideas, or concepts that have been published previously should be It is considered plagiarism for an author to present something as their own even though it is not, regardless of their intent.
It is against ScienceEdu’s policy to publish work that has already been published elsewhere. Please notify the editor if you ﬁnd an instance of a manuscript having been published previously (partially or fully).
Any part of the manuscript that is found to be untrue should be highlighted as such. Any form of data manipulation or tampering should be brought to the editor’s attention.

Publication ethics is not limited to these four items. If you believe the authors have attempted to mislead readers, infringed upon a copyright or patent, or might jeopardize the integrity of the journal in any other way, please contact the handling editor.

4. The ScienceEdu review form

Once you have gathered enough information to make a decision on the manuscript, log into your ScienceEdu account to complete the review. At minimum, you will be required to grade the manuscript based on the aforementioned criteria, as well as to summarize your major ﬁndings and give your over- all impression of the article. Although it is only optional, we highly encourage you to also take the opportunity to comment on the manuscript in more detail, and provide speciﬁc suggestions that might improve any aspect of it.

If you have made speciﬁc comments in the manuscript ﬁle, remember to anonymize them to prevent the authors from being able to identify you.

Making good comments

It’s important to ensure that all comments are constructive and intended to better the quality of the manuscript or otherwise help the authors understand where they went wrong. Please reconsider making comments that fall out of this purview.

Follow good commenting practices. For example:

Do not comment on the acceptability of the manuscript, and avoid suggesting revisions as conditions for
Provide detailed, unambiguous
Be respectful and positive. Your goal should be to help the authors improve their article, by providing constructive criticism and helpful (Consider how you would like your own manuscript to be reviewed.)
Highlight areas that need clariﬁcation or should be elaborated further by the
Make suggestions on how the authors can improve problematic passages. How might they im- prove the clarity of a given section?
You are not required to edit the authors’ style or grammar, but any improvement to the clarity of the manuscript is greatly appreciated, especially in regards to technical
Highlight consistent instances of outdated or misspelled technical
Avoid making dogmatic You should be able to back up your comments with proof or precedence in previous literature.
Take care not to dismiss the manuscript, whether in its novelty, methodology, or ﬁndings.

Recommendations

Your ﬁnal task as a reviewer will be to recommend that the manuscript be a) accepted as is, b) accepted with minor revisions, c) accepted with major revisions, d) accepted with major revisions (requiring a re-review), e) rejected but with a recommendation to re-submit after the work is more developed, or f) outright rejected. If the manuscript is rejected, you should explain your reasons why.

Each recommendation should be supported by the facts of the evaluation, and backed with constructive criticism. Be aware that you are one of at least two reviewers. Even if your recommendation diﬀers from the other reviewers’ recommendations, a good critical review will enable us to make an informed ﬁnal decision on the manuscript. Also note that the ﬁnal decision on the manuscript is made by the editorial board, taking into account the recommendations of each review, and your recommendations might not be reﬂected in this decision.