Peer Review
All submissions to Biological and Chemical Research are subject to independent blind peer review by two to three expert peer reviewers.
The objectives of the peer review process include:
- To provide expert assessment of the quality and soundness of the submission under review
- To provide guidance to the editorial decision-maker in making an informed, fair, and objective decision on whether to accept, accept subject to changes, or reject
- To provide guidance to authors on improvements to their submission
Sources of Peer Reviewers
Reviewers are drawn from the journal’s editorial board and volunteer peer reviewer pool.
Who Makes Editorial Decisions?
Editorial decisions are made by the journal’s editor in chief or associate editor on the basis of two to three expert peer reviewers’ reports.
Join Peer Review Program
We sincerely invite you to join our peer review program. By participating you will provide help to authors from all over the world and will supply them with your ideas and suggestions based on your valuable expertise. Your input will certainly improve their papers a lot. On top of that, you can also access to the latest research findings from this experience.
If you are ready to be a reviewer, please submit your CV to us. After evaluation we will contact you and let you know where to start.
Procedure:
(1) Send us your CV;
(2) Become a peer reviewer;
(3) Receive manuscripts from us, review the manuscripts, and send back your comments within 10 days.
Briefing for Peer Reviewers
- The submissions of manuscripts to the journal from Editorial Board Members will receive a discount (not exceeding 20%) off the total publication charges.
- Your name and affiliation shall appear on the masthead of our journal in each issue and our website.
- Your CV will appear on our website.
- You can recommend your friends or your colleagues to be our reviewers or editorial board members.
- We can offer a forum on our website for your reviews and short articles.
- You will receive each issue of our e-journal through email.
- As requested, you can receive journals in print only have to pay for the postage of the journals.
- As requested, we can build a link of your website or other websites.
Principles of Peer Review
Peer reviewers are asked to provide thoughtful and unbiased feedback to authors to ensure that the conclusions of papers are valid and supported by the data and manuscripts achieve reasonable standards of scholarliness and intelligibility. Reviewers should focus on the science of the paper. Principles of peer review are outlined in greater depth below:
Scientific Quality and Credibility
The arguments and conclusions of the paper under review should be valid and supported by data reported in the paper or referenced in other papers. The paper under review should be of a tone appropriate to a scientific journal. Papers should not be penalised for reporting negative research findings.
Readability and Presentation
The paper under review should read without difficulty. If the paper under review reads badly you should recommend copy editing as a condition of acceptance.
Referencing and Plagiarism
All submissions to Biological and Chemical Research are scanned using iThenticate. However no scanner is entirely accurate and none can detect some sophisticated forms of plagiarism, such as plagiarism of ideas, so we ask reviewers to be vigilant for this when reviewing the manuscript. If you detect what you believe to be plagiarised material please email us before proceeding further with your review. Instances of plagiarism we are notified of during peer review are forwarded to the Editor in Chief or Associate Editor, who will determine how to proceed.
We do not consider publication of a scientific poster or deposition of a pre-print in an archive by the same authors to constitute plagiarism.
Suitability for the Journal
The paper under review should fit comfortably within the aims and scope of the journal. It should not be likely to bring the journal into disrepute should it be published owing to the paper’s content or the content of other papers published elsewhere by the same author(s).
Validation of Data
Results should be capable of being reproduced, except in areas of genuinely novel research, where issues may be raised in papers of otherwise good quality which cannot immediately be resolved and absolutely rigorous validation of data may therefore not be possible.
Publishing Recommendations
Reviewers may optionally include a publishing recommendation in your evaluation. Publishing decisions are made by the editor in chief or associate editor on the basis of their own and the peer reviewers’ evaluations of the paper under review.
Papers under review containing content that is unscholarly or regarded by most reasonable people as psuedo-science are not acceptable for publication under any circumstances. If the paper under review contains any such material declare it in your review and recommend rejection.
Ethical Considerations
Biological and Chemical Research requires authors to confirm that they have complied with applicable ethical requirements around identifiable human subjects and experiments involving humans and animals, both when their paper is submitted and prior to publication. Editorial decision makers (Editors in Chief or Associate Editors) also look closely at these matters. If you have concerns about these areas you may add them to your peer review report.