Reviewer Guidelines
Reviewers are expected to follow the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, and must give unbiased consideration to each manuscript. They should judge each on its merits, without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex, seniority, or institutional affiliation of the author(s). It is expected that reviewer feedback to authors is constructive, courteous and clear. If you are in any doubt about the expectations for reviewers, advice should be sought from the Editor. You are also encouraged to consult the COPE flowchart What to Consider When Asked to Peer Review a Manuscript [external link].
- Conflict of Interest
- Scope and relevance
- Privacy of unpublished results
- Timeframe
- The review
- (1) Multiple-choice questions
- (2) Comments to the author(s)
- (3) Confidential comments to the Editor
- Recommendations
- What happens next?
Conflict of Interest
When asked to review a manuscript, you should disclose to the Editor any conflicts of interest that could bias your opinion of the manuscript. If you believe that you cannot judge a manuscript impartially because of contact with the authors or a possible conflict of interest, please decline the invitation to review and provide an explanation to the Editor. Importantly, the perception of a conflict of interest is as significant as an actual conflict of interest.
Financial or business relationships are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal and authors. Conflicts can also occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, or intellectual or ideological beliefs.
Possible conflicts of interest may occur when reviewers:
1. have a history of serious (unresolved) disagreement with the authors
2. have been recent (i.e. in the past 3 years) collaborators or jointly published papers
3. are currently employed at the same institution or have a mentor/mentee relationship
4. were part of an internal review panel for the paper before submission.
If you are unsure whether the potential for bias exists, please ask the Editor.
Scope and relevance
Marine and Freshwater Research publishes original and significant papers on aquatic science, and its scope spans research conducted in all aquatic habitats and ecosystems from groundwaters and wetlands to estuaries, reefs and the open ocean. Studies that are globally relevant, address broad conceptual questions and have significant applications to management and conservation are especially welcomed. The journal aims to publish the most important manuscripts with the greatest significance to the wider scientific community.
Although specialist papers at the forefront of a particular field are encouraged, they must explicitly identify their broader relevance and implications for the field. The journal discourages the submission of manuscripts that report preliminary or incremental results that do not have sufficient originality, studies that are solely descriptive or taxonomic, research that is simply another example or case study of a well-known phenomenon, and work of largely local relevance.
Privacy of unpublished results
An unpublished manuscript is a privileged document. Please protect it from any form of exploitation. Do not cite a manuscript or refer to the work it describes before it has been published and do not use the information that it contains for the advancement of your own research or in discussion with colleagues.
Do not discuss the manuscript with its authors unless permission has been granted by the Editor. Although it may seem natural and reasonable to discuss points of difficulty or disagreement directly with the author, especially if you are generally in favour of publication and do not mind revealing your identity, this practice is prohibited because the other reviewer(s) and the Editor may have different opinions, and the author may be misled by having ´cleared things up´ with the reviewer who contacted him/her directly.
Timeframe
Reviews should be completed within 21 days (3 weeks). If you know that you cannot finish the review within that time, please contact the Editorial Assistant immediately. In addition, if you believe that you cannot judge a given article impartially through contact with the authors or a possible conflict of interest, please return it immediately with an explanation.
The review
A good review is succinct, well organised, constructive and diplomatic. It describes what is interesting and significant about a manuscript, how the manuscript might be improved and, if the manuscript is not publishable, why the flaws are fatal.
Reviews for Marine and Freshwater Research consist of three sections:
- Multiple-choice questions
- Comments to the author(s)
- Confidential comments to the Editor
We recommend that you prepare your comments in a text file so that they can be copied and pasted into ScholarOne when you submit your review.
It is expected that reviewer feedback to authors is constructive, courteous and clear. In line with COPE Guidelines: Editing Peer Reviews, editors have discretion to edit the contents of review reports in limited circumstances to address issues of tone, language, and deviations from journal policy and reviewer guidelines. In doing so the editor should not change the meaning or intention of the review, nor amend or edit the professional opinion put forth by the reviewer about the quality, content, or intellectual validity of the work. The editor will inform the reviewer of any significant edits made to their review and will also advise the author that the review contents have been edited for a specific reason. A review will not be suppressed entirely unless there are ethical or legal concerns about the contents of the review.
(1) Multiple-choice questions
To help provide consistency across reviews, ScholarOne presents reviewers with six multiple-choice questions. The answers to these questions are for the Editor’s use only and are not conveyed directly to the authors. The most important questions concern the quality of the science in the manuscript and your recommendation.
(2) Comments to the author(s)
In this section, please identify the major contributions and strengths of the manuscript. Then, assess where there are weaknesses in design and analysis that are likely to affect the manuscript’s suitability for publication. Emphasise the most significant points, phrasing them in such a way that they help the author revise and amend the manuscript if feasible. Some flaws in design are fatal (e.g. inadequate sample size, inappropriate scale of replication, sampling or experimentation, unsuitable methods) and these should be clearly identified as such.
It is very helpful if comments are numbered as this makes it easier for specific reference to them by the author and Editor.
Negative criticism, no matter how justified, is hard for an author to accept, and we ask that reviewers criticise the science, not the scientist. Harsh words may cause the author (and members of the Editorial Board) to doubt the reviewer´s objectivity and perhaps discount the comments. Although an opinion expressed by an author may differ from that held by a reviewer, it should be left to stand if justified by material presented in the manuscript.
Your comments should address the following points:
- Relevance to the journal’s scope and importance to readers
- Soundness of the science (e.g. appropriate scientific approach, sampling method, experimental or survey design, statistical analysis)
- Originality
- Degree to which the data support the conclusions
- Organisation, writing style and clarity of presentation
- Length relative to information content
Specific comments should give evidence to support positive or negative general comments. Aspects to consider include:
- Presentation: Is the manuscript’s story cohesive and tightly reasoned throughout? If not, where does the text deviate from the central argument? Do the title, abstract, additional keywords, introduction, results and discussion accurately and consistently reflect the major point(s) of the manuscript? Is the writing concise, readable and easy to follow? Is there any excessive speculation? Is the English expression clear and unambiguous throughout? Please note that you are not requested to correct deficiencies of style or mistakes in grammar, but any help you can provide to the authors in clarifying meaning or correcting mistakes (such as misspellings of locations, use of outmoded terminology, misspelled or misidentified scientific names of organisms, inappropriate scientific jargon and incorrect nomenclature) is welcome.
- Justification and implications: Do the abstract and introduction clearly identify the relevance and context of the work? Are the implications of the findings specifically explained? Where relevant, are there clearly framed hypotheses and predictions? Are these adequately addressed in the results and discussion? Are caveats or limitations to the study clearly explained and compensated for?
- Length: What parts of the manuscript should be expanded, condensed or combined? Give specific advice (rather than saying ‘shorten the Introduction by 20%’, for example). Instead of correcting the whole manuscript if too long, giving a sample paragraph of condensed text may be helpful to verbose authors. Over-use of references is another common problem – more than two or three references to support a claim is usually too many, and authors should be encouraged to focus on only the key publications in the field.
- Methods: Are the methods appropriate, current and described clearly enough to allow the work to be replicated? Is the study design fully explained? Is there adequate replication at appropriate levels? Are the statistical analyses appropriate and correctly applied? Are significance statements fully justified with reference to the test statistic, its degrees of freedom and its probability level? Does the manuscript follow the journal’s guidelines for data analysis and presentation? For manuscripts reporting experiments with humans or animals, do the methods conform to established codes of practice or ethics, and have the authors documented human or animal ethics approval if relevant?
- Data presentation: Can all results be readily verified with reference to tables, figures or statistical information? Are all tables and figures necessary, readily interpretable and fully labeled?
- Errors and reference citations: Are there errors in techniques, facts, calculations or interpretations? Are only relevant references cited? Are references provided for all assertions of fact not supported by data in this manuscript? Does the manuscript present data or conclusions that are already published or in press? If so, please provide details.
In your comments to the author, please do not make any statements regarding the acceptability of the manuscript for publication. Instead, you should reserve these comments for the Editor.
You may wish to edit the manuscript yourself using Word’s ‘track changes’ feature, and upload the edited file as an attachment with your review. A Microsoft Word file of the manuscript may be available in ScholarOne by accessing the Manuscript Files tab.
You may sign your review if you wish. Unless you indicate otherwise, we shall assume that you wish to remain anonymous.
Please note that Marine and Freshwater Research sends reviewers a copy of the decision letter for each manuscript that they have reviewed. Your review will thus be shared with other reviewers of the same manuscript. Your identity remains confidential unless you have divulged it in your review.
(3) Confidential comments to the Editor
This section allows you to communicate your candid, frank and honest assessment of the quality of the science and the style of the communication to the Editor. These comments are not shown to the author.
An example might be:
‘This is an interesting topic fitting the scope of the Journal but because the authors have pooled their six sets of samples across three reefs without justification and considered this as 18 replicates, we seem to have within-reef and among-reef variation confounded. Given the marginal significance of the ANOVA on these pseudoreplicated data, I find the conclusions suspect. I also cannot figure out how they determined their SE bars on Fig. 4 (is it based on n=18 or does n=3 reefs and they averaged the 6 samples per reef?). There are no hypotheses in the Introduction and the Discussion section rambles badly on lines 233–384. Many of the isopod generic names are spelled wrongly in Table 2. Finally, 19 of the 40 references are incorrectly cited – to me, this seems a bit sloppy. These flaws do not seem fatal and I think the authors should be encouraged to revise their manuscript. I would be happy to look over it again to check the isopod names and the revised statistics.’
It is helpful to the Editor if you comment on unnecessary length and point out figures and tables that are of secondary importance and could be presented as Supplementary Material. Supplementary Material is linked to the online version of the journal article.
Your recommendation will assist the Editor in deciding whether to publish the article. If recommending revision, be specific in stating the changes you feel need to be made, allowing the author to reply to each point. Please ensure your feedback is constructive and polite.
Accept
If you're recommending acceptance, give details outlining why. There may still be a few basic typos to correct or simple suggestions to consider, but no substantial revision.
You will not be asked to review the manuscript again.
Minor revisions
These are more substantial than basic typos, but still relatively straightforward, and may include:
- Corrections to references (and is all the relevant work cited?);
- Corrections to factual, numerical or unit errors;
- Corrections to ambiguous text;
- Corrections to tables and figures – are these appropriate, sufficient, and correctly labelled?
Typically, you will not be asked to review the manuscript again after minor revision.
Major revisions
These are at a more demanding level. While you believe the research may warrant publication, you are requesting new analysis, discussion and/or significant revision. If major revisions are required, please indicate clearly what they are.
You may be asked to review the manuscript again after revision.
Reject and resubmit
Some journals offer this option where substantial revision is necessary.
Be clear in your comments to the author (or editor) which points are absolutely critical if the paper is given an opportunity for revision.
Reject
Give constructive but polite feedback where manuscripts have serious flaws. This encourages developing researchers to improve their work. Reasons for rejection may include:
- Major flaws – state what they are and the severity of their impact on the paper;
- Similarity to work already published without the authors acknowledging this;
- Major presentational problems - figures, tables, language and manuscript structure are not clear enough for you to accurately assess the work;
- Ethical issues (if you are unsure it may be better to disclose these in the confidential comments section).
You will not be asked to review the manuscript again.
What happens next?
When you open ScholarOne Manuscripts to submit your report, you will be offered some questions with a check box. The answers to these are for the use of the Editor, and are not conveyed directly to the authors. The most important are the first and last: the quality of the manuscript and your recommendation.
Keep a copy of the review in your files. If you have recommended ´major revision´, the revised manuscript may be returned to you for further comment.
Once a decision is made on the paper, you will be sent feedback on the decision and comments of other reviewer(s).
