Reviewer guidelines

Thank you for agreeing to review a manuscript for Psychological Topics (PT). We hope you will find the following guidelines helpful for preparing timely and informative reviews for manuscripts submitted to PT. The peer review process is a collaboration between the peer reviewers and the Editorial Board and these guidelines are intended to enhance that collaborative process.

Reviewers are tasked with submitting a publication recommendation to the Editorial Board regarding the acceptance, rejection, or revision and resubmission of the manuscript. The importance of this role should not be underestimated, as published articles become permanent works within the scientific literature and ultimately influence the work of future readers.

Reviewers also submit a constructive and sufficiently detailed narrative evaluation to the Editorial Board, who is responsible for providing this information to the authors. This feedback should encourage authors of rejected manuscripts to revise and resubmit their best work, as well as provide authors of accepted manuscripts with direction for future manuscripts.

In making publication recommendation, reviewers should keep in mind following three questions:

  1. Is the topic of the manuscript appropriate for Psychological Topics?
  2. Does the manuscript make a significant scientific contribution?
  3. Can the flaws in the manuscript be remedied in a revision?

In making your narrative evaluation, guidelines are provided that will hopefully be helpful, however please note that our intention is not to be prescriptive. We hope to provide general suggestions for informative and useful feedback to authors.

When writing your evaluation, please keep in mind the proposed structure and possible questions:

  1. Write a short description of the manuscript (main ideas, the problem and the results presented in the manuscript).
  2. Reflect on the importance of the topic (to what extent the conclusion of the manuscript could be valuable to the scientific audience).
  3. Was the topic elaborated with appropriate scope and in sufficient detail, with the adequate methodology? How was the conclusion drawn from obtained results?
  4. Comment on the structure of the manuscript. Does the manuscript have a typical structure of a scientific paper (title, abstract, keywords, introduction, methodology, results, discussion, conclusions, and references)? Is the manuscript written in line with the Guidelines for authors for PT?
  5. Comment on the literature review and integration: are the research aims clearly stated and well supported by relevant literature? Does the manuscript demonstrate an adequate understanding and synthesis of the relevant literature in the field?
  6. Comment on the quality of language. Is it written in a clear and understandable way?
  7. Write a summary of the strong points of the article.
  8. List your suggestions for changes that should be made in the text.
  9. Provide additional comments for the Editorial Board, e.g. possible ethical issues, or any other comments, additional explanations, and concerns that the editor could find helpful.
  10. Choose one of the categories (acceptable in the present form; acceptable with minor modifications; acceptable with major modifications; not acceptable) that the Editorial Board will likely use when classifying the article. If modifications are suggested, please indicate if editor control after revision is sufficient or if reviewer control is necessary. Please indicate whether or not you would be able to review this manuscript again, if necessary.