Peer Review Policy and Process
"Peer review" as a judgment on an academic work may affect the whole work and life of an academic person and is of the utmost goal of managing a journal. Women's Health Bulletin adheres to a double anonymized peer-review process that is rapid, fair, and ensures a high quality of articles published. In doing so, Women's Health Bulletin needs reviewers who can provide insightful and helpful comments on submitted manuscripts with a turnaround time of about 2 weeks. Reviewers are selected based on their expertise within the topic area of the submission, and their purpose is to assist the authors and the journal by providing a critical review of the manuscript. To apply as a reviewer in our journal, please send your request with your resume to womenshealth.bulletin@gmail.com. The editorial board of the journal will review your resume and will be in contact with you. Maintaining Women's Health Bulletin 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.
As part of the peer-review process, Women's Health Bulletin 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 anonymized peer review. Peer reviewers will be asked to recommend whether a manuscript should be accepted, revised, or rejected (for further information please visit ICMJE).
Rules of External Peer Review:
- Women's Health Bulletin uses double anonymized review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.
- All submitted manuscripts are subjected to the external peer review and editorial approval.
- Articles will be sent to at least 3 independent reviewers in the related field.
- Normally, the reviewers are blinded to the authors' identities and their affiliations.
- Authors are usually notified within 1-2 months about the acceptability of their manuscript.
- Reviewers are selected based on their expertise within the topic area of the submission, and their purpose is to assist the authors and the journal by providing a critical review of the manuscript.
- After receiving the reviewers’ comments, authors are requested to send the revised article and a copy of their reply to the reviewers including the comment and explaining the replies to the questions and the changes made to the revised version. The communication regarding a specific manuscript will be done only between the journal and the designated corresponding author.
Responsibility for the Reviewers
Based on the agreement with our reviewers, they are committed to these regulations:
- Reviewers should keep all information regarding papers confidential and treat them as privileged information.
- Reviews should be conducted objectively, with no personal criticism of the author. No self-knowledge of the author(s) must affect their comments and decision.
- Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments in 500 to 1000 words.
- Reviewers may identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
- Reviewers should also call to the Editor in Chief's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
- Reviewers should not review manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.
- Reviewers should not pass on the assigned manuscript to another reviewer.
- Reviewers should ensure that the manuscript is of high quality and original work.
- Reviewers should inform the editor if they find the assigned manuscript is under consideration in any other publication to their knowledge.
- Reviewers should write review report in English only.
- Reviewers should provide all required information within established deadlines.
- Finally, the duties of reviewers as outlined in Publishing Ethics Resource Kit include: Contribution to editotial decision, Promptness, Confidentiality, Standards of Objectivity, Acknowledgment of source as well as Disclosure and Conflict of interest.
What Should be Checked While Reviewing a Manuscript?
- Novelty
- Scientific reliability
- Originality
- Valuable contribution to the science
- 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