Peer review key principles
for editors

Journal reviewers play a key part in the following:

1. Assess the merit of the work and the contributions it makes to the existing body of knowledge
2. Check the statistics, methods, and sometimes correct language issues
3. Verify if the conclusions are supported by the research
4. Advise on whether earlier works may need to be considered, and comment on the relevance of the content’s scope and originality
5. Comment on ethical questions and possible research issues raised by submissions, (e.g. simultaneous submission, flag the presence of defamatory content, unethical research design, insufficient detail on patient consent or protection of research subjects, including animals).

Reviewers will then make recommendations, and the final decision on whether an article is accepted or rejected is made by the editor.

A good quality review would:

1. Consider the journal’s scope and editor’s expectations
2. Provide constructive and comprehensive comments that have been returned in a timely manner
3. The feedback given should allow the authors to see where improvements can be made and understand how they can be acted upon.

A lack of good quality peer review will ultimately impact the quality and standards of the content being published by the journal.

By providing authors with detailed and constructive recommendations, the improvements made will ensure the content that reaches publication is impactful and makes an important contribution to the existing body of knowledge.

In addition, the quality of the review can have a lasting impression on an author’s opinion of the journal, and influence whether they submit to the journal in the future and recommend it to others.

The following steps can be taken when a journal is struggling for peer review:

1. Use the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) members. Please note, the EAB member should only be selected if they haven’t had any previous contact with the paper.
2. Use an associate editor if there is one on the journal. If there is an associate editor who is well-versed in the subject area of the papers, consider inviting them as a reviewer so that the papers are anonymous and they can act as a ‘super reviewer’. Please note that this will only work if they have had no contact with the paper previously. Editorial assistants/anyone with the EA role can never be used as reviewers, as they can potentially compromise double anonymous review.
3. Consider issuing a call for reviewers.
4. Ask the journal commissioning editor (JCE) to help amend the reviewer email, to ensure it fully outlines the benefits of being a reviewer.
5. Ask the JCE to help add links to the invitation email to ascertain why reviewers are declining. In case it’s something the journal can fix.
6. Use predefined keywords. Either one can be created, or edits to the existing list may help.
7. Ask the Journal Editorial Office (JEO) to provide ScholarOne reviewer summary reports. Reviewer summary reports will outline whether there are any reviewers in the system who have not been invited before, or for some time. The JEO may be able to produce other useful reports and can advise further.
8. Use the editor’s personal network, as well as the editorial board and existing reviewers' pool personal networks?.
9. Ask the JCE for help and suggestions specific to the journal’s needs on how to expand the reviewer pool.
10. Consider using Publons Reviewer Connect as a function to use within S1 to expand the reviewer pool.

In combination with the above, it would be worth conducting a full clean-up of the journal site; for example, if a review invitation email gets a bounce-back, end that reviewer account and make them inactive.

If sufficient reviewers cannot be found for a submission according to the journal guidelines, or reviews have not been returned, please speak to the JCE and JEO so they can explore options.

If a paper is in progress, please do not take any further action on that paper until next steps have been discussed with the JEO.

If submissions do not receive the journal specific number of reviews that is detailed on its homepage, the experience is not meeting the author’s expectations, nor is their content being subjected to the rigour our authors and readers rely upon.

How we move forward in such circumstance is entirely dependent upon the context of the situation at hand, and this should be discussed further with the Journal Commissioning Editor, the Research Integrity team, and where applicable, the Peer Review Editor.

Emerald’s primary concerns are to ensure we are transparent with authors, and to provide as much support as possible to the journal. In the majority of cases, one or several of the options included in the answer to ‘What can be done if a journal is struggling to receive the journal specific number of reviews’ can be used to minimise the impact and the content can continue to publication.

If further steps are not taken to mitigate this and papers are consistently not receiving sufficient peer review, there are several technical and ethical issues that arise as a result:

1. The content cannot receive the peer review tag, which will impact the discoverability of that article.
2. The author will need to be informed that their paper will not be tagged as peer-reviewed and as a result, their paper may not be indexed in some discovery sites. Their institution may not recognise their paper as a fully published work, and they will potentially not meet their quota set by their institution.
3. If a journal consistently publishes content that is not handled in line with its own guidelines, this can impact the journal’s rankings and the journal will not be eligible for consideration by Clarivate for an impact factor.

This practice should be avoided where possible for the following reasons:

1. This cannot technically be classed as peer review, and will likely conflict with the journal’s guidelines (the majority outline the Editor will send the paper out for peer review).
2. Even though the Editor’s intentions will be sincere, this will increase the risk of bias as the process will not be anonymous.
3. The paper will not go through the necessary rigour and will lack important recommendations from subject experts to ensure it is of the highest quality.

All content that contains primary research is subject to the journal’s specific peer review process.

Viewpoints often do contain primary research, although, editorials are far less likely to. In the rare instances where primary research is included in an editorial, it should be sent out for peer review.

Unless otherwise agreed, we expect our special issue content to follow the journal guidelines as regular issue content would, and as a result, go through the same review process as regular issue content.

When an editor or guest editor want an issue to be compiled of papers that are the product of a conference, this should be pre-agreed with the JCE prior to submission; when the special issue is agreed and, our conference paper policy will need to be followed.

We are happy for our editors to submit to their own journals where appropriate, provided the review process is the same as it would be for any submitting author.

Every effort should be made to minimise any bias in the review process, by having another associate editor handle the peer review independently of the editor (we do recognise that it would be impossible to remove bias completely, but every effort should be made to minimise).

To ensure the process takes place correctly in ScholarOne, please inform the JCE and JEO prior to submission.

We are unable to publish journal content that has not been managed through the system and does not have a full peer review audit trail.

If reviewers are struggling to use the system, please discuss further with the JEO.

When selecting reviewers from the journal’s reviewer pool:

1. Avoid selecting reviewers who are from the same institution as the author.
2. Research the author and the reviewer before selecting to see if they have previously co-authored works together or worked as part of the same research team. Look out for any other factors that may increase the chances of them recognising one another.
3. If the author and reviewer are a part of the same niche subject community, every effort should be made to minimise any bias in the review process. One way to achieve this may be to invite an EAB member or Associate Editor as one of the two reviewers, provided they have no prior relationship with the paper.

When considering an author recommended reviewer:

1. Avoid selecting a recommended reviewer who is affiliated with the same institution as the authors.
2. If the author has provided a personal email address (e.g. yahoo/gmail etc.) instead of an institutional one, and an institutional profile page for the reviewer cannot be found when searched for in a search engine, we recommend refraining from selecting them.
3. We would recommend at least one independently sourced reviewer is selected for every one recommended reviewer that is used, i.e. if you require two reviewers, one may be an author-recommended reviewer, but the other one should be chosen by the Editor.

If the author and reviewer know one another’s identities, or the credibility of the reviewer or review is in doubt, this would likely result in the peer review to be compromised.

Some examples of instances where the peer review may be compromised and would require further investigation:

1. The reviewer has co-authored or contributed to an earlier version of the work they are reviewing
2. The reviewer’s account has been hacked
3. The reviewer’s account is fake
4. The reviewer and author have shared the same computer (this would be flagged by the unusual activity reports in ScholarOne).

We would recommend flagging to the JCE and Research Integrity team in the first instance. The following steps will help investigate whether the peer review may have been manipulated:

1. Search for the reviewer's name and institution to find their institutional profile page.
2. Search for the reviewer's email address in a search engine: a fake email address will not be registered anywhere and is unlikely to appear in results.
3. Search for the reviewer's publication history; is the name, email address and institution on their account up-to-date and consistent with their past publications?

For more information on how to spot manipulated peer review, please see COPE’s advice.

When this occurs, a full investigation will need to be carried out and the acceptance of the paper may need to be rescinded.

If deemed appropriate, the paper will be sent out for review once more, and every effort should be made to avoid the original causes of the compromised peer review.

When discovered, please alert the JCE and Research Integrity team so they can investigate further and advise on how to resolve the matter.

It is an important responsibility of our editors to monitor the performance of their journal’s peer reviewers and take steps to ensure their reviews are of high quality. 

We understand this can be a timely task, and support can be offered by the JCE to help facilitate this work.

Maintaining a proactive, useful and overall healthy reviewer pool requires continuous monitoring. The following steps will help achieve this:

1. The reviewer pool should be audited on a yearly basis, and reviewers assessed purely on their performance. This can be achieved by removing reviewers who provide poor quality reviews, late reviews, or they consistently do not provide reviews.
2. New reviewers should be sought to replace reviewers who have been removed.
3. The current landscape of the academic community should be reflected in the reviewer pool.
4. Draw upon sources other than personal contacts, such as author suggested reviewers (with the pitfalls outlined above avoided), and the support from the EAB.

A reviewer’s comments may be considered unproductive, inaccurate and may not align with the journal’s aims. Sadly, this can occur, and such an eventuality is hard to manage and has been the subject of debate by COPE.

Our current position on this is reviewer comments relating to the content of the paper should remain intact, however, feedback that could be considered malicious or abusive, or not relevant should be removed before being sent to the author. Additionally, we would recommend editing if the reviewer recommends their works are cited.

Where ethical issues have been found with the review, this should be immediately flagged to the JCE and the Research Integrity team who will investigate the matter further.

We fully support our editor’s editorial independence. We would, however, not expect the practice of immediately accepting a submitted paper without peer review to occur.

As we have discussed above (see answer to 'What is the impact of not receiving the journal specific number of reviews for a paper'), the impact of not sending a paper out for peer review will be in the author’s and journal’s detriment.

We encourage our editors to contact their JCE in the first instance, and Research Integrity team and JEO when applicable.

We are more than happy to support and advise, and often the best way to handle peer review and ethics issues is to discuss the matter first, before taking action.

COPE’s website has excellent resources, and we recommend our editors become familiar with their guidance upon appointment to their role.

Articles should not be uploaded to external or institutional anti-plagiarism software or to an AI tool or Large Language Model for evaluation, as content submitted to Emerald for consideration and review should be treated as confidential, and sharing this material with another person or uploading it for assessment would violate the author’s confidentiality, as well as any proprietary and/or data privacy rights.

Such software can also cache the articles assessed and thereby negatively impact the author by creating false positives in cases of originality. Further, any overlap identified by anti-plagiarism software may in fact be permissible in line with our policies, such as with regard to preprints or conference papers, and thus a potential false positive could bias the perception of an otherwise legitimate article.