Reviewer Guidelines

Reviewers are subject experts who judge whether submitted research is sound, original and a real contribution to the field. You advise the editor, give the authors feedback they can act on, identify strengths and weaknesses, and check that the work meets the journal’s ethical and policy requirements. The editor decides; you inform the decision.

Eligibility

• Ordinarily a PhD or MD, or equivalent standing earned through research or professional practice.
• An active researcher with expertise matching the manuscript’s subject.
• An affiliation with a recognised university or research institute.
• Roughly one to seven years of relevant experience and a demonstrable publication record.
• No conflict of interest with the authors, including joint publications within the last five years.

Register with your institutional email address where you have one. It is the simplest way for an editor to confirm who you are, and it keeps your record attached to the right person if you move institution later.

Registering creates a reviewer account. It does not by itself place you on any journal’s panel: you apply to the titles that match your field, and each journal’s commissioning editor decides. Being turned down by one journal does not affect an application to another.

Consortium e-Learning follows the standards of COPE, OASPA, WAME and DOAJ, and asks reviewers to work to the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers. In practice that means:

• Review only where you have the expertise to judge the work’s scientific quality.
• Declare any conflict of interest before you begin.
• Decline promptly where you cannot help, and suggest a qualified alternative if you can think of one.
• Commit to the deadline, and tell the journal manager early if your circumstances change.
• Review impartially, and write a thorough, constructive report.
• Report any suspected misconduct to the editor.
• Keep the manuscript and everything in it confidential.
• Get editorial permission before co-reviewing with anyone, and name your co-reviewer on the report.

Invitations arrive in your portal inbox and by email, and each one gives the manuscript’s title and subject, the journal, and the date the report is due. Answer within three working days, whichever way you answer. Before you accept, check:

1. Expertise. Is this genuinely within your competence to judge? A related field is not the same as this one.
2. Conflicts. Declare anything in section 5 to the editor rather than deciding for yourself that it does not matter.
3. Time. Can you deliver by the stated date? If not, propose another one now rather than later.
4. Confidentiality. Can you meet the obligations in section 4 — including not consulting anyone without permission?
5. Duplication. Have you already reviewed this manuscript for another journal? Keep your own record of what you have reviewed, so you can tell.

A manuscript sent to you for review is an unpublished, confidential document belonging to its authors. That extends to the abstract, the data, the figures and the fact of the submission itself.

• Do not circulate it. Not to colleagues, not to students, not on any mailing list or messaging group.
• Do not use it. Nothing in a manuscript under review may inform your own work, a grant application or a commercial decision before it is published.
• Do not keep it. Delete your copies once your report is submitted.
• Do not discuss it outside the review process, before or after publication, unless the journal operates open review and has told you so.

Protecting your own anonymity

Review on these journals is ordinarily double-blind. Take care not to reveal yourself to the authors through your comments or through the metadata embedded in a document you upload.

Consulting a colleague

If you want a colleague’s view, or want to involve a junior researcher as training, ask the editor first — write to info@stmjournals.com or message the handling editor — and name the person in your comments to the editor. Co-reviewing is often welcome; doing it without telling anyone is not.

A conflict can arise from a personal or financial tie to the authors, their funders or their institution, or from a competing agenda of your own. Disclose it before accepting. If one emerges part-way through a review, tell the editor immediately and withdraw.

Decline a review where you:

• Have a personal, financial or institutional conflict — including shared affiliation, or joint publication with an author in the last five years.
• Lack the expertise to judge the work.
• Cannot complete it before the deadline.
• Have already reviewed the manuscript for another journal.
• Hold a bias that could compromise your fairness.
• Have a personal or professional relationship with the editor that could influence the review.
• Cannot guarantee confidentiality.

Disclose any conflict, and any prior discussion you have had with the authors, in the confidential comments to the editor rather than in the report the authors will read.

Reviews are submitted through the review workspace in your portal. The form asks you for three scores, a written report and one recommendation. All four parts matter: a recommendation with no reasoning behind it cannot be acted on, and an editor cannot pass it to the author.

The three scores

• Novelty — does this add something not already in the literature? Judge the contribution, not the ambition.
• Methodology — are the methods appropriate, correctly applied and described in enough detail to be repeated? Do the data support the conclusions drawn from them?
• Clarity — is the manuscript organised, readable and complete? Are the figures and tables legible and necessary? Language that needs polishing is a fixable problem, not a fatal one.

What to cover

Work through the manuscript against these, as the report form sets out:

• Title and abstract — do they describe what the paper actually does?
• Introduction — context, the gap being addressed, and stated objectives.
• Literature review — current, relevant and fairly represented.
• Methodology — design, data collection and analysis.
• Results — accuracy, clarity, and whether the visualisations earn their place.
• Discussion and conclusions — supported by the results presented.
• References — adequate, accurate and appropriately cited.
• Originality and contribution to the field.
• Ethical compliance, including approvals and consent where the work involves human participants or animals, and reporting of sex and gender where relevant.
• Any concern about plagiarism or undeclared conflicts.
• Language and style.

How to structure it

1. A short summary, in your own words, of what the paper claims and does. This shows the editor you have read it and shows the author how it landed.
2. The substantive issues, in order of importance, each specific enough to address. Cite section, page, figure or equation numbers.
3. The minor points — wording, references, units, typography — kept separate so they are not mistaken for the substantive ones.
4. Anything you could not assess, and why. “I am not able to judge the statistical treatment in section 4” is useful information, not a failure.

The recommendation

• Accept — publishable as it stands.
• Minor revision — the science holds; the changes needed are presentational or small and do not require another round of review.
• Major revision — the work may be publishable, but something substantive must be added, redone or reconsidered first, and the revision should come back to a reviewer.
• Reject — the problems are not fixable within this manuscript, or the work is out of scope for the journal. Say which of the two it is; the second is not a criticism of the research.

Submit through the platform by the agreed date. Your portal shows what is outstanding and when it is due, and reminds you before the date rather than after it.

• Answer any follow-up query from the editor, or from the authors through the editor.
• Keep the manuscript confidential. The obligation does not end when the report does.
• Where a revised version comes back to you, assess specifically whether the changes address the concerns you raised the first time. Authors are typically given 10 to 15 days to revise.

Turnaround is recorded against your profile and contributes to your standing and your reward tier. It is recorded because editors need to know who they can rely on, not to rank you against your colleagues. A report that will be late is still worth submitting — tell the editor when to expect it. One that will never arrive should be withdrawn, so the manuscript can go to somebody else.

What is acceptable:

• A grammar or spelling checker on your own written report, once it contains no quoted passages from the manuscript.
• Looking up background literature or refreshing your memory of a method, without reference to the manuscript’s content.

What is not:

• Uploading or pasting the manuscript, its abstract, its figures or its data.
• Having a tool generate your assessment or your recommendation. The judgement must be yours; it is the only thing we actually asked you for.

The platform itself uses AI, and we say where: it suggests reviewers to editors and drafts editorial text. What is sent, and what is not, is set out in our Privacy Policy and our Peer Review Policy. It does not write reviews, and no AI output is ever presented to an author as a reviewer’s report.

If something about a manuscript worries you, tell the editor rather than handling it in the report. Use the confidential comments, message the editor from the review workspace, or write to info@stmjournals.com. Raise it if you suspect:

• Plagiarism — text or figures reproduced from another source without attribution. Give the source if you can.
• Duplicate or redundant publication — the same work already published or under consideration elsewhere.
• Fabricated or manipulated data — including images that appear altered.
• Missing ethical approval or consent for work involving human participants or animals.
• Authorship problems — someone credited who did not contribute, or omitted who did.

Report a suspicion, not a conclusion. You are not asked to investigate, and you should not contact the authors. The journal follows the process in its Peer Review Policy, and raising a concern in good faith will never be held against you, whatever the outcome.

Reviewing is voluntary and unpaid, as it is everywhere in scholarly publishing. What we can do is make sure it is documented and visible.

• Review certificates. Issued for each accepted report, naming the journal and the date, under the correct imprint and signed by its director. Each carries a QR code so it can be verified by whoever you show it to.
• Board membership certificates and empanelment letters. Issued when a journal appoints you to its reviewer panel or editorial board.
• Tiers. Completed reviews move you through Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, which is how editors see at a glance who has carried the load.
• Leaderboard and rewards. Standing over a rolling window, and whatever the rewards programme is offering against it.
• Reviewer challenges, conferences and training. Annual reviewer recognition, access to the reviewer conference, and expert-led training sessions run by the publishing houses.

Everything issued to you stays in your portal under My Certificates, and you can download or print it at any time — including after you stop reviewing for us.

A reviewer appointment is a continuing relationship rather than a contract, and either side may end it. Tell us if you want to step back, permanently or for a period — we would rather mark you unavailable than keep sending invitations into a void.

We may remove a reviewer from a panel, and in serious cases close an account, for:

• Breaching confidentiality, including the AI restriction in section 8.
• Reviewing despite an undeclared conflict of interest.
• Submitting a report that is abusive, or plainly not the reviewer’s own work.
• Repeatedly accepting invitations and failing to deliver.
• Using the platform or reviewer data for any purpose other than reviewing.

Certificates already issued for work genuinely completed are not withdrawn, except where the work itself turns out to have been fabricated. The full terms are in our Terms & Conditions.

Reviewer support

Questions about joining a panel, about an invitation you have received, or about anything on this page: