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Peer Reviewers

 Update: 25   July  2021

The Journal of Caring Sciences (JCS) depends on reviewers to assist the editor in determining the quality and suitability of manuscripts for publication. The purpose of these guidelines is to summarize the responsibilities of reviewers, identify areas that warrant reviewer’s attention and suggest a guideline for review process.

According to the International Committee for Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines, manuscripts submitted to journals are privileged communications that are authors’ private, confidential property, and authors may be harmed by premature disclosure of any or all of a manuscript’s details.

  • Reviewers therefore should keep manuscripts and the information they contain strictly confidential.
  • Reviewers must not publicly discuss authors’ work and must not appropriate authors’ ideas before the manuscript is published. 
  •  Reviewers must not retain the manuscript for their personal use and should destroy copies of manuscripts after submitting their reviews.
  •  Reviewers are expected to respond promptly to requests to review and to submit reviews within the time agreed. Reviewers’ comments should be constructive, honest, and polite.
  •  Reviewers should declare their conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from the peer-review process if a conflict exists.
  •  This journal uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author name(s) are concealed from each other.
  • Identity of reviewers will not be declared to authors.

In the case of accepting reviewing a manuscript, this is a request of the reviewers to re-review the future revisions of the manuscript. Of course, reviewing revisions will be handled by editorial board as it is possible in order to restrict extra burden on reviewers.

COPE has published its Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, outlining "the basic principles and standards to which all peer reviewers should adhere during the peer-review process". These can be accessed here.


Please take a look at following ethical guidelines provided by COPE for editors and reviewers, too:
- Flowcharts shows how we behave with unethical papers
- Redundunt (duplicate) publication in submitted manuscript and published article
- Suspected plagiarism in submitted manuscript and published article
- Suspected fabricated data in submitted manuscript and published article.  

Reviewer Responsibilities

 Manuscript review involves the following related responsibilities:

- the manuscript is acceptable as submitted, the reviewer should indicate its relevance and priority for publication.

- If the manuscript needs revision before it would be suitable for publication, the reviewer should detail the necessary changes.

- If the manuscript is not acceptable and could not likely be improved by revision, the reviewer should specify the reasons why it is not suitable for publication.

Online review

All process of manuscript submission and review is carried out online. Upon acceptance of invitation for manuscript review, s/he will register in website as the reviewer and then will be given access to download the entire manuscript. After reviewer, s/he may put his/her comments anew on website. After submitting his/her review, s/he will get access to other reviewers’ comments, too.

Reviewers are requested to review the manuscript according to the reviewers guideline within 14 days after receiving the mail.