Reviewer Guidelines
Current Research in Interdisciplinary Studies uses a single-blind peer-review process. Reviewers remain anonymous to authors, while reviewers are aware of the authors' identities.
Peer review should provide an independent, constructive, confidential, and expert assessment of the manuscript.
Reviewer Qualifications
Reviewers should accept assignments only when they have appropriate expertise in the subject area, methodology, theory, analytical approach, or application domain required to evaluate the manuscript.
Because the journal is multidisciplinary, reviewers should inform the editor if a manuscript requires additional specialist expertise outside their field.
Reviewer Responsibilities
- Assess the originality, significance, and relevance of the manuscript.
- Evaluate the suitability and rigor of the research methodology.
- Assess whether the evidence supports the findings and conclusions.
- Identify important methodological, analytical, theoretical, or interpretive weaknesses.
- Consider the clarity and completeness of the research description.
- Consider reproducibility and transparency where relevant.
- Identify relevant ethical or research-integrity concerns.
- Provide constructive and professional comments.
- Maintain confidentiality throughout the review process.
Interdisciplinary Research
Reviewers should evaluate the manuscript within the context of its stated objectives and disciplinary approaches.
For interdisciplinary research, reviewers should consider whether the integration of different disciplines, methods, theories, datasets, or perspectives is logically justified and contributes meaningfully to the study.
Research Methods and Evidence
Reviewers should assess whether the research design, methodology, analysis, data, theoretical framework, experiments, fieldwork, computational methods, or other approaches are appropriate for the research question.
Reviewers should consider whether the conclusions are adequately supported by the evidence presented.
Data and Reproducibility
Where relevant, reviewers should consider whether sufficient information is provided regarding datasets, research materials, analytical procedures, software, code, computational methods, or other materials necessary to understand and evaluate the work.
Reviewers should recognize legitimate restrictions involving privacy, confidentiality, licensing, security, or intellectual property.
Research Ethics
Where a manuscript involves human participants, animals, personal information, health data, field research, sensitive datasets, or other ethically regulated activities, reviewers should consider whether appropriate ethical information has been provided.
For health-related research, reviewers may consult the EQUATOR Network Reporting Guidelines where appropriate.
Conflicts of Interest
Reviewers must disclose actual, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest.
Reviewers should decline an assignment when a personal, professional, institutional, financial, academic, or other relationship could compromise impartiality.
Confidentiality
Manuscripts, data, figures, supplementary materials, source code, and editorial correspondence are confidential.
Reviewers must not share, copy, distribute, publicly discuss, or use unpublished information from a manuscript for personal or professional advantage.
Artificial Intelligence
Reviewers must not upload confidential manuscript content, unpublished data, source code, figures, or peer-review information into generative AI systems or other external tools where confidentiality cannot be assured.
Reviewers should follow relevant principles in the ICMJE AI guidance where applicable.
Reviewer Comments
Reviewer comments should be objective, specific, constructive, and professional.
Personal criticism of authors is inappropriate. Reviewers should distinguish major concerns affecting the validity or interpretation of the work from minor corrections and recommendations.
Recommendation
Reviewers may recommend:
- Acceptance
- Minor Revision
- Major Revision
- Rejection
Reviewer recommendations are advisory. The final editorial decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief or a formally designated editor acting under delegated editorial authority.
Publication Ethics
Reviewers should promptly inform the editor of credible concerns involving plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabricated or falsified results, inappropriate image manipulation, authorship concerns, undisclosed conflicts of interest, peer-review manipulation, or other research-integrity issues.
Reviewers should follow recognized publication-ethics principles, including the COPE Core Practices.