General Guidelines for Reviewers
1. Invitation to Review
Manuscripts submitted to the journal Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language “Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin” are reviewed by at least two experts, who can be Review Board members or reviewers recommended by the Academic Editor during the preliminary check. Reviewers are requested to assess the quality of the manuscript and make a suggestion as to whether it should be accepted, revised, or rejected.
The reviewers are asked to: accept or decline the invitation (depending on the title and abstract of the paper); and provide the evaluation within two months. If extra time is needed, the reviewers may request a deadline extension.
2. Review Report
The review report contains a numerical rating, narrative parts justifying the numerical evaluation, and a final decision for acceptance, revision, or rejection of the manuscript.
5.2.1. Rating the Manuscript
During the manuscript evaluation, the following aspects are rated from 0 to 4 with 4 being the maximum and 0 being the minimum:
- Scope: Does the work fall within the scope of the journal?
- Novelty: Is the topic original and well-defined? Do the results contribute to the progress of current knowledge in the field?
- Significance: Are the results significant and properly interpreted? Are all the conclusions reasonable and supported by the results?
- Quality: Is the manuscript clear, relevant for the field, and presented in a well-structured manner? Are the aims of the work and the tasks for their fulfilment well formulated? Are the data and analyses presented appropriately? Are the figures, tables, images, and schemes appropriate and easy to interpret and understand (if there are such)? Is the data correctly presented and interpreted appropriately and consistently throughout the manuscript? Are the conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented?
- Originality:Is the manuscript original? Does the manuscript report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part? Does it reuse text from another source without appropriate citation?
- Scientific Soundness: Is the manuscript scientifically sound, and is the scientific design appropriate? Is the data robust enough to draw conclusions? Are the methods, tools, and software (if such are used) described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results?
- Knowledge of the field: Are all relevant sources cited? Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years)? Does the manuscript include an excessive number of self-citations?
- Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the journal? Will the manuscript attract a wide readership or be of interest only to a limited number of people? Are the manuscript’s results reproducible based on the details given?
- Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work advance current knowledge in the field? Do the authors address important questions using novel approaches?
- Language Level: IIs the language appropriate and understandable? Is the authors’ style appropriate, and is the terminology used correctly?
If the reviewer becomes aware of any scientific misconduct, fraud, plagiarism, or any other unethical behaviour related to the manuscript, they should raise these concerns with the Academic Editor immediately.
2.2. Justification of the Evaluation
Review reports should contain the following narrative parts justifying the numerical evaluation and the final decision. These comments are generally focused on the scientific content of the manuscript and should be specific enough for the authors to be able to respond.
- A brief summary: outlining the aim of the paper and commenting on the relevance and novelty of the topic covered.
- Contributions and Strengths: emphasising the scientific soundness of the work, its originality, quality, etc.
- Weaknesses: describing the shortcomings of the study, methodological inaccuracies, the gap in knowledge identified, etc.
- Technical comments: concerning the formatting or language (stylistic, terminological) problems.
2.3. Overall Recommendation
The reviewers should provide an overall recommendation for the next processing stage of the manuscript, as follows:
- Accept in Present Form: The manuscript can be accepted without any further changes. The numerical evaluation is equal to or above 35 points. The narrative parts should reflect the selected numerical ratings and the final decision.
- Accept after Minor Revisions: The manuscript can in principle be accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given fifteen days for minor revisions. The numerical evaluation is between 30 and 34 points. The narrative sections should reflect the selected numerical ratings and the final decision and should clearly address the required changes.
- Reconsider after Major Revisions: The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The numerical evaluation is between 20 and 29 points. The narrative sections should reflect the selected numerical ratings and the final decision and clearly address the required revisions. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within two months, and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments. The authors also need to provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. If the required revision time is estimated to be longer than 2 months, the recommendation to authors is to withdraw their manuscript before resubmitting it so as to ensure that all manuscripts are given sufficient time.
- Reject and Encourage Resubmission:A manuscript that requires extra research to substantiate its conclusions will be rejected, and the authors will be urged to resubmit it once more investigation has been completed. The numerical evaluation ranges from 10 to 19 points. The narrative sections should represent the numerical ratings chosen and the final conclusion, as well as clearly discuss the required revisions.
- Reject: The manuscript has serious flaws and makes no original contribution, and the paper may be rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal. The numerical evaluation is below 10 points. The narrative sections should clearly explain the selected numerical ratings and the final decision.
The recommendation is visible only to journal editors, and not to the authors. The decision on revisions, acceptance, or rejection must always be well justified.