The Procedure of the Peer Review of Scientific Papers in the Journal “Digital models and solutions”
This document prescribes the procedure of independent examination of the submitted to the Editorial Board scientific papers to assess the relevance of their further publication in “Digital models and solutions” published in the Ural State University of Economics (USUE). The peer review process is run by the outside reviewer (the peer review is sent by the author) and the inside reviewer among the USUE staff.
1. The papers are submitted to and collected by the editorial office of the scientific journal. The editorial office is responsible for primary review of the submitted papers and assesses papers’ correspondence to the remit of the journal (whether or not a subject matter of a paper is within the scope of the journal), the formatting requirements and requirements to iriginality of the text (not less than 75%). Should the paper meet the formatting requirements and correspond to the remit, it is entered in the register of incoming papers. Otherwise the paper is not allowed further examination.
The editorial office informs authors about the results of primary review.
2. A paper submitted by an author (authors) is passed by the editorial office to a reviewer responsible for particular research field, and (or) to experts – the scientists and specialists in this field in compliance with the decision of the chief editor (deputy chief editor) and responsible editor of a journal. Additional peer review may be arranged in case of interdisciplinary or disputable character of the paper submitted.
The paper is given for peer review within the 14 days after the reviewer was determined.
3. Peer review is held confidentially.
4. Peer review is anonymous: a manuscript is given to the reviewer without authors’ names and any other details enabling identification of the authors; the results of the review are provided to authors without reviewers’ names, job titles, signatures and any other details enabling identification of the reviewers.
5. The reviewer is notified that the manuscript given to him is the intellectual property of an author (authors). The reviewer is not allowed to copy the manuscript so as to use it for his own needs or transferring to a third party.
6. Manuscript review period is not more than 14 days from receipt of the manuscript by the reviewer.
7. A reviewer may give three types of recommendations about a paper: to recommend it for publication, not to recommend it for publication, to recommend it for publication after making corrections to the paper according to the reviewer’s remarks. If the paper is not recommended for publication, the reviewer must present a reasoned critical opinion where to justify the decision. If the reviewer suggests correcting the paper, the remarks must be clearly formulated and the necessity for one more check must be stated in the review.
If the reviewer states the necessity for corrections, an author may partially or completely agree with the reviewer’s opinion, correct the paper and present the manuscript accompanied by an answer to the remarks again. In such case, the date when corrected work is returned is considered to be the date of the paper submission (for further actions see Article 2).
If the author does not agree with the reviewer’s remarks, s/he must provide a reasoned response to the remarks and specify that s/he insists on the publication of the initial version of the paper. Disputable cases are considered by the editorial board.
Otherwise, the author may withdraw the paper.
The author must inform the editorial office about any decision taken.
The second negative conclusion on the paper is the basis for its final rejection.
8. Requirements to the content of a review of a paper:
8.1 A review must present an expert analysis of a manuscript, its objective reasoned assessment as well as justified recommendations.
8.2 Particular attention should be paid to:
– general examination of academic level, terminology, structure and style of the paper, topicality of the issue;
– scientific narrative, correspondence of the research methods, methodologies, recommendations and findings to modern achievements of science and practice;
– relevance of the volume of the manuscript generally and of its elements (text, tables, figures, references); their correspondence to the theme of the paper;
– place of the paper under review among other works in this field: novelty, originality or duplication of works of other authors or earlier publications of the same author (partially or completely);
– correspondence of the title, keywords, abstract to the content of the paper;
– inaccuracies and mistakes made by an author.
9. The decision about paper publication is taken by the editorial board and approved by the chief editor (deputy chief editor) and responsible editor.
10. The editorial office has a right to reject a paper if:
а) the paper is not formatted according to the requirements and the authors refuse to correct it;
b) authors of a paper do not react to constructive criticism of a reviewer by improving paper or proving a more
convincing reasoning of their position;
c) the paper does not contain any new information or is unrelated to academic activity.
11. The editorial office informs authors about the decision taken. An author of rejected manuscript is provided with a copy of a review.
12. The manuscripts are not given back to authors.
13. The originals of reviews are stored in the editorial office within five years from the date of their signing by reviewers.
Review form (download)
Possible reasons for rejection of articles at the stage of verification by the editorial team:
- low degree of originality (significantly less than 75%);
- the use of various methods of artificially inflating originality through automated systems for increasing the uniqueness of the work;
- there is no scientific problem or solution to any problems in the paper;
- the paper lacks the structure of the article, and the author refuses to make improvements;
- the paper does not contain the qualification characteristics of scientific work, and the author refuses to pass amendments;
- the content of the article significantly diverges from the stated characteristics, and the author refuses to pass amendments;
- the author cannot eliminate all the comments of the responsible editor the third time;
- the paper represents one’s own or someone else’s course work;
- there are obvious logical gaps in the narrative of the paper, and the author refuses to pass amendments;
- “fake papers” from people from non-existent universities, citing only one author and other methods of mysterious fraud.
Possible reasons for rejection of papers at the review stage:
- low professional assessment according to the criteria: relevance of the problem under consideration, compliance of the purpose of the paper with the title and its content, statement of the scientific problem (task), literature review, scientific novelty of the results (author’s contribution), practical and theoretical significance, compliance of the conclusion with the results obtained, compliance with the abstract the main content of the work, the logic of presentation of research materials;
- the approaches and methods for obtaining the main results are questionable, the research is incomplete, unfinished, and does not reveal the problem posed;
- statistical data and their processing appear unreliable, and the author refuses to comment;
- in an attempt to correct comments, the author uses only text modeling;
- the work contains gross factual errors, and the author refuses to pass amendments;
- the main conclusions and results do not follow from the analysis;
- the stated topic is too broad and, in its essence, is not covered in the work at the proper level;
- there are significant logical gaps in the narrative of the paper that are visible to a specialist in this subject area.
