Peer Review Process
The peer review process – REVIEWER GUIDELINES
The peer review process is an independent quality control procedure for papers submitted to the Conference Proceedings. Peer review is vital for enhancing the quality, credibility and acceptability of published papers.
Papers are first reviewed by the editor(s). The editor(s) reserve the right to return improperly formatted manuscripts to the author(s), without peer review. In order to detect plagiarism, all submitted papers are checked using Crossref Similarity Check (iThenticate). If plagiarism is detected, the paper is rejected for publication.
Submissions to the Conference Proceedings authored by the editor(s) or the employees of the FEB Zagreb or the program committee members will be handled in such way as to ensure unbiased reviews. Submissions authored by the editor(s) or employees of the FEB Zagreb are considered by an appropriate program committee member, whereby the program committee member also chooses two reviewers, not employees of the FEB Zagreb.
Papers that are found suitable for review are then subject to two experts in the field of the paper, by its program committee or by other anonymous international reviewers. Referees of a paper are unknown to each other. Referees’ evaluations usually include an explicit recommendation of what to do with the manuscript, with the classification (to accept it as it is), to make a minor revision, major revision or reject it. If needed, the manuscript is sent to third, or even fourth reviewer. Referees’ comments are seen by the author(s). The review process is usually completed within two months.
In order to ascertain an effective and high-quality peer review process, the Conference Proceedings editor(s) by adopting the double-blind peer review process by at least two international reviewers, experts in the area of the paper, aim to bring independent and objective assessment of manuscripts. The factors that are considered in the review are relevance of the topic, structure of the paper, originality of the work, methods used in the paper, literature relevance, readability and language. The aim of the review process is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the paper, in terms of originality, relevance and balanced argumentation.
Therefore, each paper submitted to the Conference Proceedings is subject to the following review procedures:
it is reviewed by the editor(s) for general suitability for this publication
it is checked using a special software program for preventing plagiarism using Crossref Similarity Check (iThenticate)
two reviewers are selected and a double-blind peer review process takes place
based on the recommendations of the reviewers, the editor(s) then decide whether the particular paper should be accepted, revised or rejected, or the third (fourth) reviewer will be engaged.
Reviewers are asked to return their reports within four weeks.
Reviewers’ comments will be returned to the original author. Where appropriate, the author(s) will be encouraged to revise the paper and to resubmit it for further consideration, whereby they are obligated to fill in the author response form. The review process will follow the criteria laid out in review form.
The possible decisions after the review process are:
ACCEPT: Accepted papers will be published in the current form with no further modifications required.
ACCEPT WITH MINOR REVISIONS: Papers will be published under the condition that minor modifications are made. Revisions will be reviewed by the editor(s) to ensure necessary updates are made prior to publication. There is no a priori guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted.
ACCEPT WITH MAJOR REVISIONS: Papers will be published under the condition that major modifications are made. Revisions will be reviewed by reviewers to ensure necessary updates are made prior to publication. There is no a priori guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted.
REJECT: Rejected papers will not be published and the author(s) will not have the opportunity to resubmit a revised version of the paper.