European Geologist journal: Guidelines for peer reviewers

The European Geologist journal applies peer review in its publication process to ensure high quality standards for all published papers. We aim at recognising the efforts of our volunteer reviewers as follows. You:

• Receive a personalised reviewer certificate.
• Are included in the issue’s acknowledgment of reviewers section.

Invitation to join our independent Reviewers Board

If you are geosciences expert interested in joining the independent Reviewers’ Board of the European Geologist journal, please contact us at journal@eurogeologists.eu mentioning the following information: contact details, including your ORCID identifier, institutional affiliation, a short CV, and 5-6 keywords in line with your expertise.

The Editor-in-Chief will send you a notification once approved.

Invitation to review

Manuscripts submitted to the European Geologist journal are reviewed by at least two experts. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the Editor-in-Chief on whether a manuscript can be accepted, requires revisions or should be rejected.

We kindly ask reviewers to:

• accept or decline any invitations quickly, based on the manuscript title and abstract;
• suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must be declined;
• request an extension in case more time is required to compose a report;
• let us know if anyone else, such as a student, will participate in writing the review.

As part of the assessment, reviewers will be asked:

• to rate the originality, significance, quality of the presentation, scientific soundness, interest to the readers, overall merit and English level of the manuscript;
• to look at the reference list of the manuscript and check if there are inappropriate self-citations;
• to provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript;
• to provide a detailed, constructive review report;

Potential conflicts of interests

Reviewers shall inform the Editor-in-Chief in case they hold a conflict of interests that may prejudice the review report, either in a positive or negative way. The Editorial Board will try to identify potential conflicts of interest as far as possible before invitation. Nevertheless, we appreciate the cooperation of reviewers in this matter. Reviewers who are invited to assess a manuscript they previously reviewed for another journal should not consider this as a conflict of interest in itself. In this case, reviewers should feel free to let us know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

Confidentiality and anonymity

Reviewers shall keep the content of the manuscript, including the abstract, confidential. They must inform the Editor-in-Chief if they would like a student or colleague to complete the review on their behalf.

The European Geologist journal applies a single-blind peer review process. We kindly ask reviewers not to reveal their identity to the authors, either in their comments or in metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

The European Geologist journal offers authors the possibility to publish review reports with their paper. Reviewers may sign an open review report but the reviewer’s name will not be revealed until publication and only with their explicit agreement.

Rating the manuscript

Please rate the following aspects of the manuscript:

• Originality/Novelty: Is the question original and well defined? Do the results provide an advance in current knowledge?
• Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses and speculations carefully identified as such?
• Quality of presentation: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented appropriately? Are the highest standards for presentation of the results used?
• Scientific soundness: is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Are the data robust enough to draw the conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results?
• Interest to the readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the Journal? Will the paper attract a wide readership, or be of interest only to a limited number of people? (please see the Aims and Scope of the journal)
• Overall merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work provide an advance towards the current knowledge? Do the authors have addressed an important long-standing question with smart experiments?
• English level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?

Manuscripts submitted to the European Geologist journal should meet the highest standards of publication ethics:

• Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.
• Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse text from another source without appropriate citation.

In case reviewers become aware of scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behaviour related to the manuscript, they should directly raise these concerns with the Editor-in-Chief.

Overall recommendation

Please provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript as follows:

• Accept in present form: The paper is accepted without any further changes.
• Accept after minor revisions: The paper is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.
• Reconsider after major revisions
• Reject: The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, and the paper is rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.

Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal editors, not to the authors.

Review report

Review reports should contain:

• A brief summary (one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper and its main contributions.
• Broad comments highlighting areas of strength and weakness. These comments should be specific enough for authors to be able to respond.
• Specific comments referring to line numbers, tables or figures. Reviewers need not comment on formatting issues that do not obscure the meaning of the paper, as these will be addressed by editors.

Reviewers shall not recommend citation of work by themselves or close colleagues when it is not clearly necessary to improve the quality of the manuscript under review.

For further guidance about writing a critical review, please refer to the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.

More information on the European Geologist journal