Guidelines for Reviewers

Guidelines for Reviewers

Contents

Initial Screening

All submissions to The Scholarship of Research (SOR) undergo an initial technical and editorial screening by the Editorial Office. The Journal normally operates a strict double-anonymous peer-review process for externally peer-reviewed manuscripts. Authors and reviewers remain anonymous to one another throughout the review process, and identifying information is removed from manuscripts before external review.

The initial screening verifies that the manuscript:

a) is complete and includes all required submission components;
b) has been appropriately anonymised for double-anonymous review;
c) complies with the Journal's technical and formatting requirements;
d) includes the required ethical, data, code, registration, and transparency statements where applicable;
e) falls within the broad editorial remit of the Journal; and
f) does not contain plagiarised, duplicated, or improperly reused material.

Submissions may be screened for text similarity and originality using Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate, as part of the Journal's research-integrity procedures.

Editorial Assessment

Eligible submissions are assigned to the Editor-in-Chief or an appropriate handling Editor, who evaluates:

a) alignment with the Journal's aims, scope, and relevant article category;
b) originality and scholarly significance;
c) methodological, analytical, theoretical, conceptual, ethical, or epistemological rigor, as appropriate to the manuscript;
d) the clarity and significance of the manuscript's contribution to the research process;
e) transparency of reporting and adherence to applicable scientific and ethical standards; and
f) relevance to an interdisciplinary international readership interested in the production, evaluation, and improvement of research.

Manuscripts may be rejected without external review when they fall outside the Journal's scope, lack a sufficiently substantive contribution to research scholarship, do not meet basic scientific or ethical standards, or represent conventional empirical studies without a clear methodological, theoretical, conceptual, ethical, epistemological, analytical, or research-practice contribution.

Manuscripts considered suitable for external evaluation are normally assigned to at least two independent reviewers.

Peer Review Process

The Scholarship of Research normally uses a double-anonymous peer-review system: authors and reviewers remain anonymous to one another, while authorised members of the Editorial Office retain access to the information required to administer the review process.

Externally reviewed manuscripts are normally evaluated by at least two independent reviewers with expertise relevant to the scientific question and the type of scholarship presented.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of SOR, reviewer expertise may be methodological, statistical, computational, theoretical, philosophical, ethical, disciplinary, or substantive. For manuscripts crossing multiple domains, the Editor may deliberately select reviewers with complementary areas of expertise.

For example, a manuscript addressing artificial intelligence and qualitative interpretation may require both methodological and computational expertise; a paper examining the ethics of a research method may benefit from methodological and bioethical review; and a theoretical contribution may require reviewers with expertise in conceptual development rather than conventional empirical research.

Author-suggested reviewers may be considered at the discretion of the Editor, provided that they are independent, appropriately qualified, and free from conflicts of interest. The Journal does not rely exclusively on author-suggested reviewers.

Reviewers normally have 7 days to accept or decline an invitation and are generally expected to return their evaluation within 2–4 weeks.

Review reports are confidential. Certain invited, editorial, correspondence, or explicitly dialogical formats—including Editorials, Responses, Point–Counterpoint contributions, and selected Scientific Dialogue articles—may undergo an editorial review process appropriate to their format rather than standard external peer review. The applicable review process remains under the authority of the Editors and must preserve appropriate standards of scholarly rigor and transparency.

Reviewer Selection and Verification

The Journal takes reasonable steps to verify reviewer identity, expertise, institutional affiliation, and scholarly background before assigning a manuscript.

Reviewers are selected on the basis of relevant methodological, theoretical, disciplinary, statistical, computational, ethical, philosophical, or scientific expertise, together with their publication record and demonstrated competence in the area under review.

Suggested reviewers provided by authors are independently evaluated by the Editorial Office and are not automatically selected.

Editors seek to avoid inappropriate reviewer relationships, including recent collaborations, close institutional relationships, personal relationships, financial interests, competitive relationships, or other circumstances that could reasonably compromise—or appear to compromise—the independence of the review.

General Principles and Ethics of Peer Review

  • The primary role of the reviewer is to assist the Editors in evaluating the scholarly quality, rigor, originality, transparency, and significance of the manuscript.
  • Reviewers must provide an independent, evidence-based, objective, and constructive assessment.
  • Reviewers must maintain confidentiality and must not use unpublished information obtained through peer review for personal or professional advantage.
  • All actual, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest must be disclosed.
  • Reviewers should accept assignments only when they have sufficient expertise to evaluate the relevant aspects of the manuscript.
  • Where expertise is partial, reviewers should clearly identify which components they are qualified to evaluate.
  • Confidential comments to the Editor may be provided when appropriate but should not be used to make unsupported or inappropriate statements about the authors.
  • The recommendation made to the Editor should be consistent with the scientific issues identified in the review report.

Before Starting the Review

  • Confirm that the manuscript falls within your area of methodological, theoretical, disciplinary, statistical, computational, ethical, philosophical, or other relevant expertise.
  • Review the Journal's aims, author guidelines, applicable article category, and peer-review expectations before assessing the manuscript.
  • Consider whether any professional, academic, financial, institutional, personal, or intellectual relationship could affect your impartiality.
  • Decline the assignment if you cannot provide a rigorous review within the requested timeframe.
  • Do not attempt to identify the authors of an anonymised manuscript.
  • Do not contact the authors directly regarding the manuscript.
  • Do not share the manuscript or review assignment with colleagues, students, collaborators, or other individuals without prior permission from the Editor.

Criteria for Manuscript Evaluation

Reviewers should evaluate manuscripts according to the nature of the contribution rather than applying a single empirical-research template to all forms of scholarship.

The following principles should guide the review where applicable:

  • Originality: Does the manuscript offer a meaningful new method, idea, analysis, framework, interpretation, critique, synthesis, or perspective?
  • Contribution to research scholarship: Does the work improve, clarify, challenge, or advance how research is conceptualised, designed, conducted, analysed, interpreted, evaluated, reported, or governed?
  • Scientific rationale: Is the problem clearly defined and supported by relevant scholarship?
  • Methodological rigor: Where applicable, are the design, methods, analytical procedures, validation strategies, assumptions, and decision rules appropriate and sufficiently transparent?
  • Conceptual rigor: For theoretical and conceptual work, are concepts clearly defined, arguments logically developed, assumptions transparent, and relationships between constructs coherent?
  • Analytical robustness: Where applicable, are statistical, qualitative, computational, textual, psychometric, or other analytical methods appropriate and adequately justified?
  • Interpretability: Does the manuscript adequately distinguish what the evidence demonstrates from what is inferred, proposed, hypothesised, or argued?
  • Transparency and reproducibility: Are methodological procedures, data, code, materials, analytical workflows, or relevant limitations reported sufficiently to allow evaluation and, where appropriate, reproduction?
  • Ethical responsibility: Are relevant ethical implications recognised and appropriately addressed?
  • Epistemological awareness: Where relevant, does the manuscript adequately recognise the assumptions underlying the production, measurement, interpretation, or validation of knowledge?
  • Interdisciplinary relevance: Can the contribution inform researchers beyond a narrowly local or disciplinary context?
  • Limitations: Are limitations, boundary conditions, uncertainties, and alternative interpretations appropriately acknowledged?
  • Literature: Is the relevant literature represented accurately, critically, and fairly?
  • Research integrity: Are ethical approvals, consent, registration, authorship, data governance, conflicts of interest, and related requirements appropriately addressed where applicable?

Evaluation Across Different Forms of Scholarship

SOR publishes forms of scholarship that require different standards of evaluation. Reviewers should therefore adapt their assessment to the manuscript category.

Research Design & Protocols

  • Evaluate the importance and clarity of the research question.
  • Assess whether major design decisions are scientifically justified.
  • Consider whether the proposed methods can adequately address the stated objectives.
  • Evaluate prespecification of outcomes, analyses, decision rules, and methodological procedures where relevant.
  • Consider transparency, reproducibility, feasibility, and ethical appropriateness.
  • A protocol should provide a meaningful scientific or methodological contribution rather than merely document a future study.

Methods & Analytics

  • Assess the problem addressed by the proposed method and whether existing approaches are represented fairly.
  • Evaluate assumptions, mathematical or analytical justification, validation, benchmarking, interpretability, robustness, and limitations where applicable.
  • Consider whether examples, simulations, empirical evaluations, sensitivity analyses, or comparisons adequately support the proposed method.
  • Assess whether sufficient information, code, or documentation is available to understand or reproduce the method where appropriate.

Research Tools, Software & Data Papers

  • Evaluate scientific utility, documentation, validation, usability, interoperability, provenance, and potential for reuse.
  • Consider whether software versions, licences, repositories, dependencies, or persistent identifiers are adequately reported.
  • For Data Papers, evaluate data quality, documentation, governance, provenance, metadata, reuse potential, and limitations.

Theory & Concepts

  • Evaluate conceptual clarity, logical coherence, originality, scholarly grounding, and internal consistency.
  • Assess whether the proposed framework, theory, model, or concept meaningfully changes or advances how a phenomenon may be studied or understood.
  • Empirical data should not be required merely because a manuscript is theoretical or conceptual.

Ethics, Epistemology & Philosophy of Research

  • Evaluate the rigor, coherence, and scholarly grounding of the argument.
  • Assess whether competing perspectives and relevant counterarguments are represented fairly.
  • Consider whether the manuscript demonstrates concrete implications for research methods, evidence, interpretation, responsibility, governance, or scientific practice.

Replication, Reproducibility, Re-analysis & Null Findings

  • Evaluate methodological rigor independently of whether the findings confirm or contradict previous research.
  • Do not treat lack of statistical significance as evidence of low scientific importance.
  • Assess statistical precision, power, uncertainty, equivalence or compatibility where relevant.
  • Consider whether confirmatory and exploratory analyses are clearly distinguished.
  • Evaluate the scientific informativeness of the findings and their implications for the reliability or interpretation of existing evidence.

Methodological Lessons & Research Notes

  • Assess whether the experience described produces transferable methodological knowledge.
  • The contribution should move beyond reporting a local operational problem.
  • Consider whether the authors adequately explain what was learned, why it matters, and how other researchers may benefit.

Perspectives, Commentaries, Debates & Research Provocations

  • Evaluate the scientific basis, coherence, originality, and relevance of the argument.
  • Opinion alone is not sufficient.
  • Assess whether claims are appropriately supported by scholarship and whether alternative interpretations are acknowledged.
  • A provocative argument may challenge established practice, but it must remain scientifically grounded and intellectually rigorous.

Structure and Tone of the Review

A useful review should normally:

  • Begin with a concise summary of the manuscript's purpose and principal scholarly contribution.
  • Provide an overall assessment of the importance and rigor of the work.
  • Clearly distinguish major issues from minor issues.
  • Explain why identified issues matter rather than simply stating that something should be changed.
  • Provide specific, actionable recommendations where revision could strengthen the manuscript.
  • Distinguish necessary revisions from optional suggestions.
  • Avoid requiring authors to adopt the reviewer's preferred methodology when the authors' chosen approach is scientifically defensible.
  • Avoid requesting unnecessary analyses, citations, experiments, or expansions unrelated to the manuscript's central contribution.
  • Maintain a professional, respectful, and objective tone throughout.
  • Place sensitive or confidential information intended only for the Editor in the dedicated confidential-comments field.

Presentation, Transparency, and Reporting Quality

  • Assess whether the manuscript is sufficiently clear to allow critical evaluation by an interdisciplinary readership.
  • Evaluate the clarity and scientific usefulness of tables, figures, conceptual models, analytical workflows, algorithms, and supplementary materials.
  • Check whether methodological assumptions and analytical decisions are reported transparently.
  • Consider whether the manuscript follows an appropriate reporting guideline where one exists.
  • Assess whether limitations, uncertainties, deviations from protocols, exploratory analyses, and methodological choices are adequately disclosed.
  • Request additional methodological details, data descriptions, code documentation, or supplementary information only when necessary for scientific evaluation or reproducibility.

Timeline and Communication

  • Accept or decline the review invitation within the timeframe indicated in the invitation.
  • If you become unable to complete the review, inform the Editorial Office promptly.
  • If additional time is required, contact the Editor before the review deadline whenever possible.
  • All review reports must be submitted through the Journal's manuscript management system.
  • Reviewers should not communicate directly with authors concerning manuscripts under review.

Editorial Decision

The Editor-in-Chief or delegated handling Editor makes the final editorial decision after considering the reviewers' reports, the authors' responses and revisions, and the overall scholarly contribution of the manuscript.

Peer reviewers provide expert advice but do not make the publication decision.

Possible editorial decisions include:

  • Accept submission
  • Minor revision
  • Major revision
  • Resubmit for review
  • Decline submission

Additional reviewers may be consulted when reviews substantially disagree, when specialist expertise is required, or when a revised manuscript introduces substantial methodological or conceptual changes.

Editorial decisions are made independently and are not influenced by commercial, financial, institutional, sponsorship, or other external interests.

Conflicts of Interest

Reviewers must disclose any relationship or circumstance that could reasonably affect—or be perceived to affect—their independence or impartiality.

Potential conflicts may include, but are not limited to:

  • recent or ongoing collaboration with an author;
  • employment at the same institution or organisational unit;
  • supervisory or mentoring relationships;
  • personal or family relationships;
  • direct academic competition;
  • financial interests;
  • strong personal involvement in the methodology, theory, technology, intervention, product, or scientific position being evaluated.

The existence of a differing scientific position does not by itself constitute a conflict of interest. However, reviewers must be capable of evaluating competing approaches fairly.

When uncertain, reviewers should disclose the potential conflict to the Editor before accepting the assignment.

Ethical Considerations During Review

Reviewers should confidentially alert the Editor if they identify or reasonably suspect:

  • plagiarism or substantial unattributed overlap with existing work;
  • duplicate or redundant publication;
  • fabricated, falsified, manipulated, or implausible data;
  • inappropriate image, figure, or analytical manipulation;
  • serious methodological misrepresentation;
  • unreported deviations from a registered protocol or analysis plan that materially affect interpretation;
  • ethical concerns involving human participants, animals, sensitive data, or vulnerable populations;
  • inappropriate authorship or undisclosed competing interests;
  • unethical or misleading use of artificial intelligence;
  • manipulation or attempted manipulation of the peer-review process;
  • breaches of privacy, confidentiality, consent, or data governance.

Suspected misconduct should be reported to the Editor rather than investigated independently by the reviewer.

Reviewers must not contact authors, institutions, research participants, or third parties in an attempt to investigate concerns arising during peer review.

Confidentiality and Artificial Intelligence

Manuscripts submitted for peer review are confidential documents. Reviewers must not share, distribute, reproduce, upload, publicly discuss, or otherwise disclose unpublished manuscript content.

Reviewers must not use information obtained through peer review for their own research, professional advantage, competitive benefit, or any other purpose unrelated to the review.

Because manuscripts may contain unpublished ideas, confidential information, proprietary methods, sensitive data, or copyrighted material, reviewers must not upload manuscripts or substantial manuscript content to publicly accessible or externally hosted generative artificial intelligence systems, Large Language Models, or other tools when doing so could compromise confidentiality, data protection, copyright, intellectual property, or research integrity.

Reviewers remain fully responsible for the intellectual content, accuracy, fairness, and originality of their review reports. Artificial intelligence must not replace independent expert judgment or be used to generate an evaluation that the reviewer has not personally conducted.

Any permitted use of AI-assisted technologies must comply with the Journal's Artificial Intelligence Policy and applicable confidentiality and data-protection requirements.

Quality, Language, and Professional Conduct

Reviewer comments must remain professional, constructive, specific, and evidence-based.

Disagreement with an author's methodology, theoretical position, interpretation, or scientific perspective must be expressed through scholarly argument rather than dismissive or personal language.

Reviewers should evaluate the science rather than the identity, status, nationality, institution, seniority, discipline, or presumed characteristics of the authors.

Comments concerning language should focus on whether the manuscript can be scientifically understood. Reviewers should not reject otherwise valuable scholarship solely because the authors are not native English speakers when the scientific content can be adequately evaluated.

Even when recommending rejection, reviewers are encouraged to explain the principal scientific reasons for their recommendation in a way that may help the authors improve their work.

Submission of Reviewer Comments

The reviewer form includes:

A) a section for comments to the authors;
B) a separate section for confidential comments to the Editor;
C) structured evaluation fields or ratings where applicable;
D) an optional area for uploading an annotated review file; and
E) a final editorial recommendation.

The available recommendations are:

  • Accept submission
  • Revision required
  • Resubmit for review
  • Resubmit elsewhere
  • Decline submission

The recommendation should reflect the scientific assessment provided in the written review. Reviewers should avoid recommending rejection on the basis of issues that could reasonably be resolved through revision unless those issues fundamentally undermine the validity, originality, scope, or scholarly contribution of the work.

For questions concerning the peer-review process, please contact the Editorial Office of The Scholarship of Research: sor@ieditore.com.