Reviewers Guidelines

 

1. Overview

World Journal of Economics, Business, and Management is committed to maintaining the highest standards of scholarly publishing through a rigorous, fair, transparent, and impartial peer review process. Peer review plays a vital role in ensuring the quality, originality, reliability, and academic significance of the research published in the journal.

The journal employs a double-blind peer review system, whereby the identities of both authors and reviewers remain confidential throughout the review process. This approach promotes objective evaluation, minimizes potential bias, and supports independent scholarly assessment.

The peer review process is intended to ensure that manuscripts are evaluated solely on their academic merit, methodological quality, originality, clarity, and relevance to the journal's aims and scope.

The evaluation is carried out in a careful and objective manner and it is expected that the reviewers will give constructive and insightful comments in order to improve the scientific quality of the manuscript and to strengthen its empirical and theoretical contribution to the fields of economics, business administration, and management studies.

 

2. The aim of the review process

The main aim of the peer-review process is to choose manuscripts that are sound and of a high standard for publication in WJEBM. The review system makes sure that each paper published in the journal meets the criteria the journal has set for originality, methodological soundness, analytical depth, clarity of presentation, and relevance to the journal's aims and scope.

 

3. Review Principles

The journal places a high value on a variety of academic viewpoints, global insights, and interdisciplinary expertise at all stages of the review process. Reviewers are selected from a wide range of international institutions, research organizations, universities, and professional environments.

In evaluating manuscripts, reviewers are expected to:

·        Give fair, well-balanced, and helpful criticism.

·        Honour the intellectual property and the academic work put in by the authors.

·        Evaluate the submissions solely based on their scholarly and methodological quality without showing any bias.

·        Make it clear what the strengths are, what the limitations are, and what areas need to be improved in the manuscript.

·        Provide the editorial board with clear recommendations to help them arrive at a well-informed decision.

 

4. Ethics relating to confidentiality and publication

The manuscripts that are sent to WJEBM are to be treated as strictly confidential. It is essential that reviewers do not disclose, share, cite, or talk about any part of an unpublished manuscript, the review comments, or the editorial correspondence with anyone who is not authorized to do so unless they receive explicit written consent from the Editor-in-Chief.

It is necessary to keep confidentiality at all times, both before, during and after the review cycle and also after the article has been published. When they receive an invitation, reviewers must adhere to standard publication ethics (those in accordance with COPE guidelines) and have to declare any possible conflicts of interest—financial, professional, personal or institutional—right away.

 

5. Editorial preliminary screening (desk review)

When the manuscript is submitted via the journal's manuscript management system (Open Journal Systems - OJS), the editorial office carry out an initial screening. At this stage the editor determines whether the manuscript:

·        Is within the focus, aims, and scope of WJEBM.

·        The journal's author guidelines, structural standards, and manuscript template are followed.

·        Shows enough originality, novelty, and contribution in a theoretical or practical sense.

·        It clearly sets out the research problem, its objectives, and the findings.

·        Applies rigorous methodologies that are appropriate and free from any critical flaws.

·        The journal's anti-plagiarism threshold is met as a result of automated similarity checks (for example, using Turnitin or iThenticate).

Manuscripts which do not satisfy these basic minimum requirements will be desk rejected or sent back to the authors for correction before they are subjected to peer review.

 

6. Peer Review Stage

Manuscripts which pass the first editorial screening are given to independent peer reviewers; WJEBM uses a double-blind peer review system, which means that the identities of both the authors and the reviewers are kept hidden from one another during the review process.

The reviewers make a critical evaluation of the submission with regard to its conceptual framework, the foundation it has in the literature, its empirical design, the statistical or qualitative analyses it employs, the way in which the results are discussed, and the accuracy of the references. After this, they submit an evaluation report which includes detailed comments together with one of the following recommendations:

·        Accept the submission: the manuscript is acceptable as it stands with only minor or no alterations required.

·        Minor revisions are needed: although the manuscript is conceptually sound, it should undergo some modifications, clarifications, or formatting adjustments.

·        Requesting a review with major revisions: the paper needs to be substantially revised, further data collection carried out, or involve more extensive theoretical development before it goes through a second round of review.

·        Reject the manuscript: It has serious flaws in concept, structure, or methodology and is therefore not suitable for publication.

 

7. Editorial Decision

When the handling editor receives the reviewers' reports and recommendations, they assess the critiques in order to decide on the suitable editorial action. The editor then gives the corresponding author a formal notification of the decision together with the anonymized comments from the reviewers.

The Editorial Board is the last body to decide whether or not to accept a manuscript, ask for revisions, or reject it, taking into account the reviews, the editorial standards, and the journal's priorities.

 

8. Review Process Flow

The standard peer-review lifecycle in WJEBM follows these steps:

·        The author sends the manuscript through the online submission system (OJS).

·        The editorial desk carries out a first screening to check on compliance and scope.

·        The originality and similarity index of the manuscript are checked using automated screening software.

·        Those submissions which fail to meet the baseline requirements are either desk-rejected or sent back for formatting.

·        Manuscripts that are compliant are sent to at least two independent expert reviewers under double-blind conditions.

·        The manuscript is assessed by the reviewers using scholarly and methodological standards.

·        Reviewers prepare detailed reports and give clear recommendations as to whether publications should be approved.

·        The handling editor looks at the recommendations and then comes to a editorial decision.

·        The editor then sends the official decision together with the feedback report to the corresponding author.

·        The manuscript is accepted, is revised and then resubmitted for further review, or it is rejected.

·        Manuscripts that have been accepted are then sent on to copyediting, layout proofing, and final production.

 

9. A commitment to reviewing quality

In World Journal of Economics, Business, and Management all the review procedures are carried out with rigorous oversight and a strict commitment to international publishing ethics. The editorial team is determined to keep the peer-review process transparent, impartial, constructive and timely in order that credible scholarship in the fields of economics, business and management may be disseminated.