Peer Review Policy
Peer-Review Process: The editorial board can reject articles which do not meet IJPNS standards without review or even reject them once the review is done by a technical expert. Only those articles which will pass the editorial review will be sent to the peer-review process. The decision to reject the articles by the Editorial Board is generally taken in 2 weeks. For manuscripts that are referred to experts for peer-review, a decision will be taken in maximum 30 days and the corresponding author will be informed the outcome of the peer-review process within 30 days. After the peer-review process, one of the following decisions will be taken and communicated to the authors based on the recommendation received from the experts:
- Article rejected
- Article needs minor modifications
- Article needs significant modifications
- Article needs no modifications and accepted in the present format
During the peer-review process, the article will be sent to two experts and a final decision will be taken once the comments from both the reviewers will be received. However, in cases where one of the reviewers is unable to send the comments in the stipulated time-frame, a decision will be taken after considering the comments received from the lone reviewer. In such cases, the decision to accept or reject the article shall be solely based on the recommendation of the lone reviewer and binding. In cases where the reaction is adverse based on the single review, the corresponding author may request a second peer-review by another expert and IJPNS will follow standard time to complete the same.
Article falling in (ii) and (iii) categories will be sent back to the corresponding author (s) with comments obtained during the peer-review process for further action at their end. It is expected that the corresponding author must respond within 2 weeks after making necessary changes and incorporating the changes as requested by the reviewer. IJPNS follows a double-blind peer-review process and the identity of both authors and reviewers will not be revealed at any stage under any circumstances. The final manuscript received after incorporating suggested comments will undergo a final grammar check and published online and all the authors will be intimidated via e-mail upon publication of articles.
Authors must recommend the names of 3 experts in the field from which the article belongs. The Editorial Board may choose 1 reviewer from the suggested list and the other reviewer shall be selected by the Editorial Board. A brief justification (60 words) should be given about the expertise of the suggested reviewers and why they are qualified to review the article. The suggested reviewers should be from a different institute and must not belong to the same institutions. Once the list of suggested reviewers will be received from the corresponding author, the complete review process will be managed by IJPNS and the name of reviewers will be finally revealed at the time of publication.
IJPNS follows a 3-tier peer-review process for all the articles submitted to the journal. In the first step, all the submitted papers will be assigned a unique ID number and immediately referred to the Editorial Board. If the Board member (s) find the article suitable and falling under the aims and scope of the journal, it will be referred to experts for peer-review. After the peer-review process, the editor overseeing the peer-review process will communicate the recommendations of the peer-review process to the Editorial Board. The Editorial Board then makes a final call on acceptance or rejection of the articles. The comments and observations of the peer-review process will be shared with the corresponding author (s) (even if the article has been rejected) to improve the quality of the article. IJPNS does not allow resubmission of rejected manuscripts.