Reviewer Guidelines
Table of Content
Invitation to Review
Potential Conflicts of Interest
Review Reports
Rating the Manuscript
Overall Recommendation
Invitation to Review
Manuscripts submitted to Review of Islamic Social Finance and Entrepreneurship (RISFE) 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 editor on whether a manuscript should be accepted, require 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. Possible conflicts of interest include:
- Reviewer works in the same institute as one of the authors.
- Reviewer is a co-author, collaborator, joint grant holder, or has any other academic link, with any of the authors within the past three years.
- Reviewer has a close personal relationship, rivalry or antipathy to any of the authors.
- Reviewer may in any way gain or lose financially from publication of the paper.
- Reviewer has any other non-financial conflicts of interest (political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, intellectual, commercial or any other) with any of the authors.
Reviewers should disclose any conflicts of interest that may be perceived as bias for or against the paper or authors.
Please kindly note that if reviewers are asked to assess a manuscript they previously reviewed for another journal, this is not considered to be a conflict of interest. In this case, reviewers should feel free to let the Editorial Office know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.
Reviewers are also recommended to read the relevant descriptions in the Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Review Reports
We have listed some general instructions regarding the review report for your consideration below.
To begin with, please consider the following guidelines:
- 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.
Review reports should contain the following:
- A brief summary outlining the aim of the paper, its main contributions and strengths.
- General concept comments. (1) Article: highlighting areas of weakness, the testability of the hypothesis, methodological inaccuracies, missing controls, etc. (2) Review: commenting on the completeness of the review topic covered, the relevance of the review topic, the gap in knowledge identified, the appropriateness of references, etc. These comments are focused on the scientific content of the manuscript and should be specific enough for the authors to be able to respond.
- Specific comments referring to line numbers, tables or figures that point out inaccuracies within the text or sentences that are unclear. These comments should also focus on the scientific content and not on spelling, formatting, or English language problems, as these can be addressed at a later stage by our internal staff.
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.
Rating the Manuscript
During the manuscript evaluation, please rate the following aspects:
- Novelty: Is the question original and well-defined? Do the results provide an advancement of the current knowledge?
- Scope: Does the work fit the journal scope?
- Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses carefully identified as such?
- Quality: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented appropriately? Are the highest standards for presentation of the results used?
- Scientific Soundness: Is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Is the data robust enough to draw conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results? Is the raw data available and correct (where applicable)?
- Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the journal? Will the paper attract a wide readership, or be of interest only to a limited number of people? (Please see the Aims and Scope of the journal.)
- Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work advance the current knowledge? Do the authors address an important long-standing question with smart experiments? Do the authors present a negative result of a valid scientific hypothesis?
- English Level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?
Manuscripts submitted to P3EI journals should meet the highest standards of publication ethics:
- Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.
- Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse text from another source without appropriate citation.
- The studies reported should have been carried out in accordance with generally accepted ethical research standards.
If the reviewer becomes aware of any scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behavior related to the manuscript, they should raise these concerns with the in-house editor immediately.
Overall Recommendation
Please provide an overall recommendation for the next processing stage of the manuscript as follows:
- Accept Submission: The paper can be accepted without any further changes.
- Revisions Required: The paper can in principle be accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given seven days for revisions.
- Resubmit for Review: Substantive inadequacies in the paper, such as data analysis, the main theory used, and rewriting of paragraphs, need to be revised and the manuscript needs to be reviewed for another round.
- Resubmit Elsewhere: The paper does not accept for the sensor journal and inadequate quality, it should be submitted to some other journal.
- Decline Submission: The paper 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.