Information for Reviewers
Rigorous peer review is a vital part of the publishing process at Highlights of Science. Reviewers who perform an invaluable service to the scientific community are essential to ensure the quality of papers published in Highlights of Science journals.
Peer Review
A single-blind peer-review process is applied for all manuscripts (except for non-peer-reviewed types) submitted to Highlights of Science journals. During the peer review process, reviewers know the identity of authors, but authors are not aware of the identity of reviewers.
Authors and reviewers are given the choice to participate in Open Peer Review. In such cases, authors can choose to publish all review reports and their corresponding responses to the review comments alongside their paper. In any cases, the reviewers' identities remain confidential during the peer review process unless they choose to sign their reviews. If a reviewer signs their report, their identity will be disclosed after the final publication of the paper they reviewed.
Authors and reviewers are encouraged to embrace Open Peer Review, which offers several benefits. Firstly, it allows readers to gain insight into the reviewers' perspectives and the issues they raised, as well as the authors' responses to those concerns. Secondly, publishing signed reviews not only acknowledges the valuable contributions of peer reviewers but also promotes transparency and credibility in the peer-review process.
Invitation to Review
Each manuscript submitted to Highlights of Science journals will be assessed by at least two independent reviewers. The selected reviewers are based on their expertise, publication history, and/or past reviews for Highlights of Science journals. Review invitations are sent by email through the online editorial management system. Reviewers can click the link included in the invitation email to accept or decline the invitation, based on the manuscript title and abstract.
Reviewers should accept an invitation only if they have relevant and necessary expertise, do not have any conflicts of interest with respect to any of the authors and the manuscript, and can provide an unbiased assessment for the research within the time frame specified in the invitation email. Reviewers who accept to review a manuscript are expected to provide quality review reports and remain responsive throughout the peer review process, and maintain standards of professionalism and ethics.
Criteria for Judgement
Reviewers are asked to evaluate the manuscript to provide recommendation to editors on final decision-making and comments to authors on how to improve their paper. When doing the assessment, reviewers will also be asked to rate the English language, and check if the work meets the highest standards of publication ethics, i.e., the manuscript must be original, not be plagiarised, nor a duplication of previous work.
Overall Recommendation: Reviewers are required to submit an overall recommendation for each manuscript to help the editors on decision-making. These include Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, and Reject. Accept recommendations suggest that the paper is acceptable in its current form and requires no further corrections. If a reviewer has any additional comments, please submit a Minor Revision (manuscript requires minor changes) or Major Revision (manuscript requires extensive reworking or additional experimental work, and apart from exceptional circumstance, a maximum of one round of major revision is
allowed per manuscript) recommendation. Reject recommendations indicate the manuscript is not suitable for the journal, or it has serious flaws.
Rating the Manuscript: Reviewers are asked to comment on the following aspects of a manuscript:
Originality and Novelty — Is the research question clearly defined and in the end appropriately answered? Are there appropriate and adequate references to previous studies?
Significance — Is the work a significant contribution to the field? How significant are the findings described in the article, and do they represent an advance in current knowledge and understanding?
Scientific Soundness — Is the work scientifically sound and not misleading? Have the authors followed relevant ethical guidelines? Are the conclusions based on sound data? Are the methods described in enough detail to allow another researcher to reproduce the experiments?
Quality of Presentation — Is the manuscript well organised and written clearly enough to be accessible to non-specialists? Have the data been properly analysed and interpreted?
Quality of Language — Is the English language used clear and readable? Is the English language written technically and grammatically correct?
Tips for Writing the Reviews
Summarise the paper in 3–5 sentences, i.e., the aim of the paper and its main contributions.
A separate, short paragraph outling the strengths and potential weakness of the paper. Please discuss and justify your comments with the appropriate level of details.
Detailed comments to the paper that help the authors understand the weaknesses in their work and how they might improve it. The comments should concentrate on the scientific content, leaving spelling and formatting corrections for the copy-editing phase (for accepted papers). The comments should also be detailed so that the authors may correctly understand and address the points raised. Please refer to line numbers, tables or figures that point out inaccuracies within the text or sentences that are unclear.
Recommend references: (1) 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. (2) 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. (3) Only recommend references as needed that can clearly improve the quality of the manuscript.
All the comments should be written in English. It is important for reviewers to prioritise the scientific aspects in their evaluations. They should refrain from relying on artificial intelligence algorithms like ChatGPT to generate review comments and should also avoid using pre-made templates. This ensures that the feedback provided is genuine and tailored to the specific content being reviewed.
Editor Decision
At the end of the peer-review process for a manuscript that passed the initial editorial screening and was sent out for external review, the academic editors (the Editor-in-Chief, members of the editorial board, or invited guest editors) will make an editorial decision based on reviewers' comments and their own judgement. For this reason, the editorial decision of a paper may differ from the one that a reviewer recommended.
One of the following decisions may be made by the academic editors:
Accept — The manuscript is considered of high quality and can be published in its current form and requires no further corrections.
Minor Revision — The manuscript has a very good chance of being accepted for publication after revision. Authors are asked to resubmit the revised paper within a given deadline, and the revised version will be returned to the reviewers for further comments.
Major Revision — The manuscript has a chance of being accepted but would depend on the revisions. Authors are asked to resubmit the revised paper within a given deadline, and the revised version will be returned to the reviewers for further comments.
Reject and Encourage Resubmission — If very substantial changes are requested that are too significant to warrant a revision of the article in its current form, the manuscript will be rejected and the authors are encouraged to re-submit the paper once it has been substantially rewritten.
Reject — The manuscript has major flaws that could not be resolved by revision and resubmission.
Reviewers will be notified via email that a final decision of the manuscript they reviewed has been made. The decision and comments can be accessed through the online system.
Refereeing Policies
Conflicts of Interest — Reviewers should provide impartial and objective assessments for the papers they are invited to review. Please notify the journal's editorial office of any personal, professional or financial conflicts of interest that may affect the impartiality of the review report.
Confidentiality — Reviews must be done in strict confidence. Manuscripts that are under review should not be disclosed to a third party. Reviewers should destroy the copies after submitting their review. Reviewers must inform the journal's editorial office beforehand if they wish to discuss the paper with a colleague.
Anonymity — All Highlights of Science journals apply a single-blind peer-review process. The review process is conducted anonymously. Please do not reveal any identity to the authors, either in the comments or in reports submitted via attached files.
Objective Comments — Reviewers should concentrate on providing an objective assessment of the work and should avoid making statements that could cause offence, are derogatory or potentially libellous.
Timeliness — Reviewers are asked to return the reviews within the time period specified in the invitations to ensure a high-efficient publishing service for the community. Please contact the journal's editorial office to request a possible extension when the review cannot be done timely.
Review Recognition
Certificate of Review — Reviewers will receive an email confirmation for each review they complete. They are also free to request a personalised at any time upon a final editorial status (the editorial office will inform reviewers the final status of the manuscripts they review) of a manuscript is reached.
Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Services — Reviewers are strongly encouraged to submit their review work to the Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Services (formerly Publons) for recognition. In order to do so, just simply forward the final acknowledgement email from the journal's editorial office to reviews@webofscience.com.
Reviewer Discount Vouchers — Highlights of Science will issue discount vouchers to reward the reviewing work by reviewers. Reviewers then can use these discount vouchers for their submissions to journals published by Highlights of Science to get a reduced APC.
Annual Acknowledgement — The journal's editorial office will publish an annual acknowledgement to reviewers who supported the reviewing work in that year.
Comments and Questions
Please send your comments and questions to or directly to the journal's editorial office.
