Review Process

To maintain the quality and suitability of papers to the journal before publication, all submitted manuscripts will be subjected to a double-blind peer-review process. The double-blind process will ensure that both reviewers and authors’ identities are concealed from each other. Additionally, this process is aimed at maintaining objectivity, originality, and robustness of the manuscripts. The double-blind peer review will limit reviewer bias to a great extent thereby enhancing the quality of the manuscripts.

Authors will receive feedback from reviewers after acceptance or rejection of the manuscript. Authors can expect written comments and a decision about their accepted papers from the Editor within 3 months after submission. Papers with minor revisions are supposed to be returned within 30 days and approximately 90 days for major revisions. Authors will be given immediate feedback on the rejection of a paper at the preliminary screening assessments by the Editor. Papers which are resubmitted and revised will be accepted for publication based on sufficient improvements to the paper, and if the reviewers’ comments have been addressed.

Authors may be asked to withdraw their paper or risk having their papers withdrawn if reviewers’ comments have not been addressed after the duration of the time for revision. Papers accepted will be processed by the journal’s in-house team for typesetting, quality checks and PDF proofs. Authors will have the opportunity to correct the PDF proofs within 10 days before the final proofs are sent to the Editor for final checks. Once the typesetting processes are complete and the Editor approves the final checks, the paper will be assigned a DOI number for reference and published.  

To facilitate the double-blind review process, all authors must consider the following:

  1. Ensure that the title page is separate from the manuscript
  2. Remove any identifying information such as author’s name and affiliation from the manuscript before submission
  3. Authors who have self-cited must use the third person to refer to their works in the submitted manuscript. For instance, authors should write Harley and Bloom (2018) found that rather than the authors have previously demonstrated that (Harley and Bloom, 2018).
  4. Figures and tables should not contain any reference to the authors; neither should there be any author affiliation to the figures
  5. Authors must ensure that any references to funding sources and acknowledgements are excluded from the manuscript.
  6. Authors should follow the submission guidelines with care to avoid any inadvertent information in the manuscript pertaining to the author affiliations and names.


The peer-review process