Table of Content
- Introduction
- Purpose and Rewards of Reviewers
- Reviewers’ Responsibilities
- What Should be Checked While Reviewing a Manuscript?
- Peer-Review Process
- How to Review a Manuscript via the JCALS Portal
Journal of Critical Applied Linguistics Studies (JCALS) Guide for Reviewers
Information for Reviewers
Reviewing a manuscript written by a fellow scientist is a privilege. However, it is a time-consuming responsibility. Hence, JCALS’s Editorial Board, authors, and audiences appreciate your willingness to accept this responsibility and your dedication. JCALS adheres to a double-blind peer-review process that is rapid, fair, and ensures a high quality of articles published. In so doing, JCALS needs reviewers who can provide insightful and helpful comments on submitted manuscripts with a turnaround time of about 6 weeks. Maintaining JCALS as a scientific journal of high quality depends on reviewers with a high level of expertise and an ability to be objective, fair, and insightful in their evaluation of manuscripts. We hope that the information provided here will help making your work easier.
Purpose and Rewards of Reviewers
JCALS reviewers’ opinions of manuscripts are invaluable in helping Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board in making their decisions. Peer-reviewing will help you keep up with the field and get new understandings that will improve the quality and value of your own studies.
In appreciation of your invaluable service to the JCALS, your name will be included in a list we publish on the webpage of reviewers who have reviewed for the JCALS. Also, reviewers who consistently exhibit excellent reviews and respond promptly to the editorial requests are considered for invitation to the Editorial Board.
If JCALS’s Editor-in-Chief has invited you to review a manuscript, please consider the following:
- Reviewing manuscript critically but constructively and preparing detailed comments about the manuscript to help authors improve their work
- Reviewing multiple versions of a manuscript as necessary
- Providing all required information within established deadlines
- Making recommendations to the editor regarding the suitability of the manuscript for publication in the journal
- Declaring to the editor any potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authors or the content of a manuscript you are asked to review
- Reporting possible research misconducts
- Suggesting alternative reviewers in case you cannot review the manuscript for any reasons
- Treating the manuscript as a confidential document
- Not making any use of the work described in the manuscript
- Not communicating directly with authors, if somehow you identify the authors
- Not identifying yourself to authors
- Not passing on the assigned manuscript to another reviewer
- Ensuring that the manuscript is of high quality and original work
- Informing the editor if you find the assigned manuscript is under consideration in any other publication to your knowledge
- Writing review report in English only
- Authoring a commentary for publication related to the reviewed manuscript
What Should be Checked While Reviewing a Manuscript?
- Novelty
- Scientific reliability
- Originality
- Valuable contribution to the field
- Adding new aspects to the existed field of study
- Ethical aspects
- Structure of the article submitted and its relevance to authors’ guidelines
- References provided to substantiate the content
- Grammar, punctuation and spelling
- Scientific misconduct
As part of the peer-review process, JCALS and all its reviewers abide to the confidentiality of manuscripts submitted to journal. In this regard, we do not share information about manuscripts, including whether they have been received and are under review, their content and status in the review process, criticism by reviewers, and their ultimate fate, to anyone other than the authors and reviewers. Any requests from third parties to use manuscripts and reviews for legal proceedings are refused.
Also, reviewers are advised not to keep the manuscript for their personal use and should destroy paper copies of manuscripts and delete electronic copies after submitting their reviews. It should also be noted that, rejected manuscripts are kept in the editorial system as an archive. But, published manuscripts and all their contents regarding copies of the original submission, reviews, revisions, and correspondences are kept in perpetuity for further questions about the work should be raised.
Each manuscript is sent to two or more reviewers in the process of blinded peer review. Peer reviewers will be asked to recommend whether a manuscript should be accepted, revised, or rejected.
How to Review a Manuscript via the JCALS Portal?
As the first step in the review process, we send an invitation email to the reviewers and provide them with the abstract of manuscript. We will then register them via the JCALS portal and a Username and Password will be sent to them automatically.
To complete the review process and to get access to the full text of manuscript, reviewers should login via the JCALS portal then follow the instructions provided in below:
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