Invitation to Review

Manuscripts submitted to SJMRD journal are reviewed by at least two experts. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the external editor on whether a manuscript can be accepted, requires revisions or should be rejected.

We ask invited reviewers to:

• accept or decline any invitations quickly, based on the manuscript title and abstract;
• suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must be declined;
• Request an extension in case more time is required to compose a report.

As part of the assessment, reviewers will be asked:

• to rate the originality, significance, quality of the presentation, scientific soundness, interest to the readers, overall merit and English level of the manuscript;
• to provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript;
• to provide a detailed, constructive review report;

Reviewer Guidelines

The Sahamati Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development (SJMRD) is a peer-review journal. We are sincerely grateful to scholars who give their time to peer-review articles submitted to SJMRD journal. Rigorous peer-review is the corner-stone of high quality academic publishing.

While preparing the reports, Referees are asked to: Describe the quality of the manuscript according to the following criteria. 

• Originality of work; has not been published elsewhere in any medium by the authors or anyone else and is not under consideration for publication in any other medium.
• Scope of the journal
• Methods of investigation 
• English language 
• Backup reading: references

Please rate the following aspects of the manuscript:

• Originality/Novelty: Is the question original and well defined? Do the results provide an advance in current knowledge?
• Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses and speculations carefully identified as such?
• Quality of Presentation: 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? Are the data robust enough to draw the conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results?
• 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 provide an advance towards the current knowledge? Do the authors have addressed an important long-standing question with smart experiments?
• English Level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?

Manuscripts submitted to SJMRD journal 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.
• For biological studies, the studies reported should have been carried out in accordance with generally accepted ethical research standards.

General Expectations

1. Please, DO NOT put your name, affiliation or address in the review
2. Describe the significance that the work has for the scientific community,
3. Inform us whether we should consider the manuscript further and what should be done in order to make it publishable (if that is possible),
4. Comment on technical aspects of the paper, such as the statistical analyses,
5.  Evaluate the reliability of the results and validity of the conclusions,
6. Evaluate the authors’ experimental or theoretical approach to the discussed problem(s),
7. Comment on whether the manuscript presents the most recent literature on the topic discussed,
8. Comment on the originality of the presented work,
9. While preparing the reports, we ask our Referees to:

Please note that accepted papers will undergo language editing by native English speakers. Incorrect grammar, style or punctuation should not constitute sufficient reason to reject a paper if it is still intelligible for the reviewer and its content warrants publication from a scientific point of view.

Double-blind peer review guidelines

For this journal that uses double-blind peer review, the identities of both reviewers and authors are concealed from each other throughout the review. To facilitate this, authors must ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in such a way that they do not reveal their identities to reviewers, either directly or indirectly.

Please therefore ensure that the following items are present in your submission and are provided as separate files:

Title Page

The title page will remain separate from the manuscript throughout the peer review process and will not be sent to the reviewers. It should include:

• The manuscript title
• All authors’ names and affiliations
• A complete address for the corresponding author, including an e-mail address
• Acknowledgements
• Conflict of interest statement

Anonymised manuscript

Please remove any identifying information, such as authors’ names or affiliations, from your manuscript before submission.

As well as removing names and affiliations under the title within the manuscript, other steps need to be taken to ensure the manuscript is correctly prepared for double-blind peer review.  The key points to consider are:

• Use the third person to refer to work the authors have previously published. For example, write ‘Jha and Subedi (2015) have demonstrated’ rather than ‘we/the authors have previously demonstrated.
• Make sure that figures and tables do not contain any reference to author affiliations
• Exclude acknowledgements and any references to funding sources.  Use the title page, which is not sent to reviewers, to detail these and to declare any potential conflicts of interest to the editor.

Conducting the Review

Peer review is the collaborative process that allows manuscripts submitted to a journal to be evaluated and commented upon by independent experts within the same field of research. Upon receipt, manuscripts are assessed for their suitability for publication by the editorial staff. Only the manuscripts meeting the journal’s general criteria for consideration are sent out for review. Reviewing needs to be conducted confidentially, the articles should not be disclosed to a third party.

Timely Review Reports

SJMRD aims to provide an efficient and high quality publishing service to authors and to the scientific community. We ask reviewers to assist by providing review reports in a timely manner. Please contact the editorial office if you require an extension to the review deadline.

Peer-review publication policies

All contributions submitted to this journal that are selected for peer review are sent to at least one, but usually two or more, independent reviewers, selected by the editors. Authors are welcome to suggest suitable independent reviewers and may also request that the journal excludes one or two individuals or laboratories. The journal sympathetically considers such requests and usually honours them, but the editor’s decision on the choice of referees is final.

Editors, authors and reviewers are required to keep confidential all details of the editorial and peer review process on submitted manuscripts. Unless otherwise declared as a part of open peer review, the peer review process is confidential and conducted anonymously; identities of reviewers are not released. Reviewers must maintain confidentiality of manuscripts. If a reviewer wishes to seek advice from colleagues while assessing a manuscript, the reviewer must consult with the editor and should ensure that confidentiality is maintained and that the names of any such colleagues are provided to the journal with the final report. Regardless of whether a submitted manuscript is eventually published, correspondence with the journal, referees’ reports and other confidential material must not be published, disclosed or otherwise publicised without prior written consent. Reviewers should be aware that it is our policy to keep their names confidential and that we do our utmost to ensure this confidentiality. We cannot, however, guarantee to maintain this confidentiality in the face of a successful legal action to disclose identity.

The publisher reserves the right to contact funders, regulatory bodies, journals and the authors’ institutions in cases of suspected research or publishing misconduct.

Peer-Review Procedure

All manuscripts sent for publication in our journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts (this includes research and review articles, spontaneous submissions, and invited papers). The Managing Editor of the journal will perform an initial check of the manuscript’s suitability upon receipt. The Editorial Office will then organize the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least two review reports per manuscript. We ask our authors for adequate revisions (with a second round of peer-review if necessary) before a final decision is made. The final decision is made by the academic editor (usually the Editor-in-Chief of a journal or the Guest Editor of a Special Issue). Accepted articles are copy-edited and English-edited.

Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal editors, not to the authors.

The reviewers should reject the manuscripts if they observed below faults;

Mismatch with the journal

• The manuscript does not make a contribution to new knowledge in the discipline or the application of knowledge
• Manuscripts that lie outside the stated aims and scope of the journal
• Topics that are not of interest to the journal’s readership
• Manuscripts that do not follow the format specified by the journal

Flaws in study design

• Poorly formulated research question
• Choice of a weak or unreliable method
• Choice of an incorrect method or model
• Inappropriate statistical analysis
• Unreliable or incomplete data
• Inappropriate or suboptimal instrumentation
• Small or inappropriately chosen sample

Poor writing and organization

• Introduction that does not establish the background of the problem studied
• Inadequate description of methods
• Discussion that only repeats the results but does not interpret them
• Insufficient explanation of the rationale for the study
• Insufficient literature review
• Conclusions that do not appear to be supported by the study data

Inadequate preparation of the manuscript

• Failure to follow the journal’s Instructions for Authors
• Sentences that are not clear and concise
• Title, abstract are not persuasive
• Wordiness and excessive use of jargon
• Poor grammar or spelling mistakes
• Poorly designed tables or figures

After reviewing the manuscripts carefully the reviewers should make  their recommendations as below;

a) Rejected due to poor quality, or out of scope

b) Accept without revision

c) Accept but needs revision (either major, moderate or minor)

In the latter case, clearly identify what revision is required, and indicate to the editor whether or not you would be happy to review the revised articles.

During the manuscripts evaluation process, the reviewers should follow and fulfill the “Review Form” and it should be sent to editorial office along with  revised manuscripts.

• Click below to download form:

IF YOU CANNOT JUDGE ALL PARTS, PLEASE, INDICATE WHICH CHAPTERS SHOULD BE REFEREED BY ANOTHER REVIEWER