Reviewer Guidelines

International Journal of Scientific Research and Management (IJSRM) ISSN (Online): 2321-3418 | DOI Prefix: 10.18535/ijsrm Publisher: Valley International

Peer review is what separates a scholarly journal from a repository. IJSRM is grateful to the researchers who give their time to it. These guidelines set out what the journal expects of reviewers and what reviewers can expect of the journal. They follow the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.

1. Before You Accept an Invitation

Please respond to an invitation within three days, whether you accept or decline. A prompt decline is far more helpful than a delayed one, and declining is entirely acceptable. If you cannot review, suggesting a suitable alternative reviewer is appreciated.

Before accepting, please confirm that:

• The subject is within your expertise. Accept only if you can judge the substance of the work. If you can assess part of it competently — the statistics but not the clinical content, for example — accept and tell the editor which aspects you can and cannot evaluate.
• You have no competing interest (see Section 3).
• You can meet the deadline — normally 21 days from acceptance. If you need longer, say so at the outset and the editor will usually accommodate a reasonable extension or find another reviewer.

2. Confidentiality

A manuscript sent for review is an unpublished, confidential document.

• Do not share, forward, or discuss it with anyone without the handling editor's explicit permission. If you wish to involve a colleague or a junior researcher in the review as a training exercise, ask the editor first and name the person in your report so their contribution can be acknowledged.
• Do not retain copies once the review is complete, and do not use data, ideas, or interpretations from the manuscript in your own work, or to your own advantage, before publication.
• Do not upload the manuscript, or any part of it, to ChatGPT or any other public AI tool. Doing so places confidential unpublished work into a third-party system and constitutes a breach of confidentiality. If you use any AI assistance in preparing your report, disclose this to the editor and take full responsibility for the content of your review.
• Reviewer identities are not disclosed to authors. Please do not attempt to contact the authors directly, and do not sign your report.

3. Competing Interests

Decline the invitation if any of the following applies, and tell the editor why:

• you have co-authored with, collaborated with, or supervised any author within the past three years;
• you work at the same institution as an author;
• you have a financial interest in the outcome, or funding from an interested party;
• you have a close personal relationship, or a known personal conflict, with an author;
• you are working on a directly competing project that the manuscript could affect.

Because review is double-blind, you may not know the authors' identities — but if you can reasonably infer them and a conflict exists, disclose it. Disclosure never counts against a reviewer; undisclosed conflict does.

4. What to Assess

Please structure your report around the following. Not every criterion applies to every article type; use your judgement.

Originality and contribution. Does the work add something genuinely new? Are you aware of substantially overlapping published work the authors have not cited?

Scope and significance. Is the question worth answering, and does it fall within the journal's multidisciplinary remit?

Methodology. Is the design appropriate to the question? Is the sample, dataset, or corpus adequate and appropriately described? Could another researcher reproduce the work from the description given? For quantitative work, are the statistical methods appropriate and correctly applied, with tests named, assumptions checked, and effect sizes or confidence intervals reported rather than p-values alone? For qualitative work, is the analytical approach explicit and the interpretation traceable to the data?

Results. Are the results reported completely and neutrally? Do the tables and figures present the data clearly and without duplicating the text? Do any images show signs of manipulation?

Conclusions. Do the data support what the authors claim? Are limitations acknowledged? Is causation being inferred from correlational data?

Ethics. For human studies, is there an ethics committee name and approval number, a statement on informed consent, and reference to the Declaration of Helsinki? For animal studies, are the governing guidelines named? For case reports and identifiable images, is written consent for publication confirmed? Are competing interests, funding, data availability, and AI use declared?

Literature and citation. Is prior work cited fairly and accurately? Is anything important missing? Are there signs of citation padding? Please do not ask authors to cite your own work unless it is genuinely necessary to the argument — coercive citation is treated as a breach of these guidelines.

Presentation. Is the manuscript clear and well organised? Note serious problems with English, but you are not expected to copy-edit.

5. Writing the Report

Write the report you would want to receive.

• Address the work, not the authors. "The control group is not described" is useful; "the authors are careless" is not.
• Be specific. Point to the section, page, or figure. A general statement that the methods are weak gives an author nothing to act on.
• Separate the essential from the optional. Distinguish changes required for the work to be sound from suggestions that would merely improve it.
• Justify your criticism. If you believe a conclusion is unsupported, explain why.
• Say what works too. Identifying the strengths helps both the author and the editor.
• Put confidential remarks in the right place. Comments to the editor — including suspicions of misconduct or your recommendation — go in the confidential field, not in the comments to authors. Do not state your recommendation in the author-facing comments; the decision is the editor's to communicate.

6. Recommendations

Choose one:

• Accept — publishable essentially as it stands.
• Minor revision — sound work needing small, clearly specified changes.
• Major revision — the underlying work may be publishable, but substantial changes, additional analysis, or significant rewriting are required. Expect to see it again.
• Reject — the work is fundamentally flawed, out of scope, or the concerns cannot be resolved by revision.

Reviewers advise; the handling editor decides, with the Editor-in-Chief holding final authority. A recommendation that is not followed does not mean the review was disregarded — editors weigh multiple reports alongside their own reading.

7. If You Suspect Misconduct

Report concerns to the editorial office rather than raising them with the authors. This includes suspected plagiarism or undisclosed overlap with published work, fabricated or falsified data, manipulated images, duplicate submission, missing or false ethics approval, and undeclared conflicts of interest. Please provide the evidence — a source reference, a specific figure — and let the editorial office investigate. All allegations are handled confidentially under COPE flowcharts, and authors are always given an opportunity to respond.

8. Reviewing a Revised Manuscript

When a revised manuscript returns to you, assess whether your substantive points have been addressed — not whether the authors did exactly as you asked. A reasoned rebuttal is a legitimate response to a review. Please avoid introducing significant new criticisms at this stage unless they arise from changes the authors have made.

9. Recognition

Peer review at IJSRM is voluntary and unpaid. On request, the editorial office will provide written confirmation of your review activity for use in professional appraisal, promotion, or reviewer-recognition services.

10. Contact

Editorial Office — International Journal of Scientific Research and Management (IJSRM) Website: https://ijsrm.net | Email: editor@ijsrm.net