Reviewer Guidelines
Energy and Environmental Research follows a single-anonymous (single-blind) peer-review process. Reviewers remain anonymous to authors, while reviewers are aware of the authors' identities.
Reviewers play an important role in maintaining the scientific quality, methodological rigor, relevance, and integrity of the journal's published record.
Reviewer Qualifications
Reviewers should accept assignments only when they have appropriate subject expertise, methodological knowledge, or relevant professional experience.
For energy and environmental manuscripts, appropriate expertise may include energy systems, renewable energy, environmental science, climate science, sustainability, ecology, environmental engineering, natural resources, pollution studies, environmental economics or policy, modelling, agricultural and resource sciences, or other relevant fields.
Reviewers should decline an assignment when they do not have sufficient expertise to provide a reliable assessment.
Reviewer Responsibilities
Reviewers should provide independent, objective, constructive, and evidence-based assessments.
Reviews should focus on the manuscript and its scholarly content rather than the authors personally.
Evaluation Criteria
Reviewers should consider, where applicable:
- Relevance to the journal's aims and scope;
- Originality and significance;
- Scientific or scholarly contribution;
- Appropriateness of the methodology;
- Quality and reliability of data;
- Appropriateness of analysis;
- Clarity of presentation;
- Validity of figures, tables, models, and calculations;
- Whether conclusions are supported by the evidence;
- Appropriate discussion of limitations; and
- Compliance with applicable ethical and regulatory requirements.
Energy and Environmental Research
Where relevant, reviewers should consider whether energy performance, environmental impacts, sustainability claims, resource use, emissions, modelling assumptions, field measurements, or policy conclusions are adequately supported.
Reviewers should distinguish demonstrated findings from assumptions, projections, scenarios, or speculative interpretations.
Methods and Reproducibility
Reviewers should assess whether the methods are sufficiently described to permit appropriate evaluation of the research.
Where relevant, reviewers should consider the adequacy of sampling, experimental design, measurements, models, algorithms, statistical analysis, computational procedures, assumptions, and uncertainty assessment.
Data and Research Transparency
Where applicable, reviewers should consider whether the manuscript provides sufficient information concerning data sources, datasets, analytical procedures, software, models, and data availability.
Reviewers should not request disclosure of confidential, proprietary, restricted, or personally identifiable information where disclosure would be inappropriate.
Environmental and Field Research
For field-based or environmental research, reviewers should consider whether sampling methods, study locations, permits or permissions where relevant, measurement procedures, environmental conditions, and limitations are adequately described.
Research Ethics
Where research involves human participants, animals, personal data, environmental permissions, hazardous materials, protected locations, or other regulated activities, reviewers should consider whether appropriate ethical or regulatory requirements have been addressed.
Ethical concerns should be communicated confidentially to the editor.
Conflict of Interest
Reviewers must disclose actual, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest before accepting or completing a review.
Conflicts may include financial interests, institutional relationships, personal relationships, recent collaboration, supervisory relationships, competitive interests, or other circumstances that could affect impartiality.
Confidentiality
Manuscripts and all information received during peer review must be treated as confidential.
Reviewers must not share, reproduce, distribute, use, or disclose unpublished manuscript content or information without authorization.
Unpublished information obtained through peer review must not be used for personal, professional, academic, or commercial advantage.
Reviewer Comments
Reviewer comments should be clear, specific, respectful, and constructive.
Reviewers should identify major concerns separately from minor corrections and provide sufficient reasoning for substantive criticisms.
Personal criticism, discriminatory language, hostile comments, or irrelevant demands should be avoided.
AI-Assisted Review
Reviewers must protect manuscript confidentiality when using any AI-assisted tool.
Reviewers should not upload confidential manuscripts or substantial portions of unpublished manuscripts to external AI systems where confidentiality cannot be assured.
Reviewers remain responsible for the accuracy and integrity of their review and must not allow AI-generated content to replace their independent scholarly judgment.
Recommendation
Reviewers may recommend:
- Accept;
- Minor revision;
- Major revision; or
- Reject.
Reviewer recommendations are advisory and do not constitute the final publication decision.
The Editor-in-Chief has overall responsibility for editorial decisions and may delegate manuscript handling and decision-making to a qualified Senior Editor, Associate Editor, or other formally designated editor.
Publication Ethics
Reviewers should alert the editor to suspected plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabricated or manipulated data, inappropriate image manipulation, undisclosed conflicts of interest, peer-review manipulation, or other serious research-integrity concerns.
The journal follows recognized principles of responsible scholarly publishing, including relevant guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).