For reviewers

4. General Guidelines for Reviewers

Invitation to Review

Manuscripts submitted to Futurity Research Publishing journals are reviewed by at least two experts, who can be volunteer reviewers, members of the Reviewer Board or reviewers suggested by the academic editor during the preliminary check. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the external editor on whether a manuscript should be accepted, requires revisions, or should be rejected.

We ask invited reviewers to:

• accept or decline any invitations as soon as possible (based on the manuscript title and abstract);
• suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must be declined;
• request a deadline extension as soon as possible in case more time is required to provide a comprehensive report.

Potential Conflicts of Interest

We ask reviewers to declare any potential conflicts of interest and email the journal Editorial Office if they are unsure if something constitutes a potential conflict of interest.

Reviewers are also recommended to read the relevant descriptions in the Ethical Guidelines For Peer Reviewers by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Declaration of Confidentiality

Futurity Research publishing journals operate double-blind peer review. Until the article is published, reviewers should keep the content of the manuscript, including the Abstract, confidential. Reviewers should also be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors, either in their comments or in metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF format. 

Review Reports

We have listed some general instructions regarding the review report for your consideration below.

To begin with, please consider the following guidelines:

To review articles in Futurity Research Publishing, it is mandatory to use the form for reviewers. Read the whole article as well as the supplementary material, if there is any, paying close attention to the figures, tables, data, and methods.
Your report should critically analyze the article as a whole but also specific sections and the key concepts presented in the article.
Please ensure your comments are detailed so that the authors may correctly understand and address the points you raise.
Reviewers must not recommend citation of work by themselves, close colleagues, another author, or the journal when it is not clearly necessary to improve the quality of the manuscript under review.
Reviewers must not recommend excessive citation of their work (self-citations), another author’s work (honorary citations) or articles from the journal where the manuscript was submitted as a means of increasing the citations of the reviewer/authors/journal. You can provide references as needed, but they must clearly improve the quality of the manuscript under review.
Please maintain a neutral tone and focus on providing constructive criticism that will help the authors improve their work. Derogatory comments will not be tolerated.

General questions to help guide your review report for research articles:

• Is the manuscript clear, relevant for the field and presented in a well-structured manner? 
• Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years) and relevant? Does it include an excessive number of self-citations?
• Is the manuscript scientifically sound and is the experimental design appropriate to test the hypothesis?
• Are the manuscript’s results reproducible based on the details given in the methods section?
• Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate? Do they properly show the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand? Is the data interpreted appropriately and consistently throughout the manuscript? Please include details regarding the statistical analysis or data acquired from specific databases.
• Are the conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented?
• Please evaluate the ethics statements and data availability statements to ensure they are adequate.

General questions to help guide your review report for review articles:

• Is the review clear, comprehensive and of relevance to the field? Is a gap in knowledge identified?
• Was a similar review published recently and, if yes, is this current review still relevant and of interest to the scientific community?
• Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years) and relevant? Are any relevant citations omitted? Does it include an excessive number of self-citations?
• Are the statements and conclusions drawn coherent and supported by the listed citations?
• Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate? Do they properly show the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand?

Overall Recommendation

Please provide an overall recommendation for the next processing stage of the manuscript as follows:

• Accept in Present Form: The paper can be accepted without any further changes.
• Accept after Minor Revisions: The paper can in principle be accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.
• Reconsider after Major Revisions: The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. A maximum of two rounds of major revision per manuscript is normally provided. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within ten days and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments. If the required revision time is estimated to be longer than 1 months, we will recommend that authors withdraw their manuscript before resubmitting so as to avoid unnecessary time pressure and to ensure that all manuscripts are sufficiently revised.
• Reject: The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, and the paper may be rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.

Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal editors, not to the authors. Decisions on revisions, acceptance, or rejections must always be well justified.