Reviewing the Manuscripts

Reviewing the Manuscripts

All copyrighted materials submitted to the editorial office of the journal “Journal of the Institute for African Studies” are reviewed in order to assess the originality and quality of the manuscript. The review contains a set of formal criteria for evaluating the material – scientific novelty, the relevance of the study, the degree of explanation of the topic, etc. If necessary, the reviewer may recommend amending, re-submitting the article after completion or reject the publication of the article.

Review takes place in several stages:

  1. internal review by editorial staff, including the editor-in-chief and / or members of the editorial board. At this stage, the material is pre-evaluated and can be rejected for the following reasons:
    • the manuscript does not comply with the editorial policy, theme, or profile of the journal;
    • the content of the manuscript does not correspond to the stated topic;
    • inconsistency of the proposed material with the nature and level of scientific publication (articles, reviews, scientific reports, etc.);
    • poor quality of the material (ignorance of the main sources and literature on the topic, weak factual and evidential bases, inconclusive conclusions, repetition of the conclusions and theses well known in the scientific literature on the subject, etc.);
    • when submitting the manuscript, registration requirements are not taken into account.
  1. A manuscript that has passed the intra-editorial stage of review is sent to an external scientific review by an authoritative expert in a given subject area, who within the period of the preceding three years has published works on the subject of the reviewed article. The method of “double-blind” (anonymous) review is used mainly, that is, the reviewer and the author do not know each other. In this case, the editors are guided by:
    • confidentiality (the inadmissibility of the transfer or familiarization of third parties who do not have the appropriate authority from the editorial board with the text of the review);
    • identifying cases of plagiarism and other unethical practices;
    • efficiency and objectivity in work,
    • reasoning of the evaluation of the research results;
    • verification of specified sources of information;
    • unconditional identification and exclusion of conflicts of interest, including the absence of official and other links between the reviewer and the author.

Reviewers in their work rely on the principles formulated by the Committee on the Ethics of Scientific Publications and observe:

The editorial board takes into account the opinion of the reviewer when deciding on the publication of the manuscript, as well as the need for the author to take into account the reviewer’s comments when finalizing the text.

The text of the review is preserved in the editorial office of the journal for five years. To improve the quality of the proposed publication, the editorial staff, in strict compliance with the standard rules and procedures for blind peer review, familiarizes the authors with the comments of the reviewer and/or sends the authors of the submitted materials copies of the reviewer’s assessment or a motivated refusal to publish.

Also, upon request, a copy of the review is sent to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (Ministry of Education and Science of Russia).