The procedure for review of manuscripts submitted to the Editorial Board of the journal «Arid Ecosystems»

Approved at the meeting of the Editorial Board in December 18, 2009

1. All manuscripts submitted to the journal are registered, reviewed for compliance with the Rules of the journal for manuscript layout (instructions for authors) and sent to the member of the Editorial Board responsible for this area of research, or a section of the journal. At discrepancy of the manuscript to the Rules, the editors immediately inform the author by e-mail, and, until and unless the authors change the article according to the Rules, it will not be reviewed.

2. Member of the Editorial Board responsible for this area acts as a first reviewer and sends the manuscript for review to the independent reviewer of the journal, who is a specialist in a narrower field of this area corresponding to the content of the article.

3. When deciding on the possibility to publish an article, the reviewer should answer the following questions:

Does this article correspond to the topics of “Arid Ecosystems”?

If it does, the next question is:

— Does this article contain any new results? 

If it does, then the third question is:

— Would you recommend this article for publication without substantial revision? (Keeping in mind that technical correction is not included in the concept of substantial improvements and is provided in the working order if there is a positive review).

If you would not recommend the article for such publication, then you should indicate what was the reason for requiring rework?

  • the style of writing in general does not correspond to the genre of scientific article,
  • there is no clear statement of the research problem described in the article,
  • the actuality of the problem is not substantiated,
  • there is no description of the relations between the task and the problem,
  • the methodology of the study is not clear,
  • there are no references to the earlier researches, which aimed to solve the similar problems,
  • the description of the experiment, the results of which form the basis for the conclusions, is not convincing enough (or reliable enough),
  • the article has no conclusion to summarize the obtained results,
  • the conclusion contains the matters that are not derived from the text of the article,
  • the conclusions are posed with the degree of generalization of the above permissible level,
  • the text of the article has semantic repetitions, unnecessarily increasing its size,
  • the article has lots of text, which are meaningless or not relevant to the topic of the article, and so increasing its size unnecessarily,
  • the article has lots of text with broken logic of reasoning,
  • there are different words in the text to describe the same thing and they can have diverging interpretations and to be unclear to the reader, 
  • there is the same term used in the text to refer to the different concepts,
  • there are phrases in the text which have not an established unambiguous interpretation in the scientific and pedagogical literature, and they are not explained by the author,
  • the annotation do not specify the results and explain their novelty,
  • the the article or its parts do not correspond to the Rules for authors,
  • something else.

And finally, the last question: 

— Do you consider it is possible to review this article after it is partly reworked (by the author’s agreement), or should the material be fully reworked? 

4. Coming reviews of the manuscript are to be sent to the authors by e-mail and anonymously.

5. After the manuscript is reworked according to the reviewer’s comments, the materials received from the authors in accordance with the Rules of the journal by e-mail of the Editorial Board (the reworked manuscript and the author’s response to the reviewer) are to be given to the reviewer. Revision of the articles takes as long as it is needed for the reviewer to come to conclusion that the article can be published in the journal. This information and the recommended manuscript will be registered by the Editorial Board.

6. The final decision about publishing or rejection is taken by the Editorial Board during its meeting and is a result of discussion after the article is presented by a member of the Board with every existing review and a positive reviewer’s conclusion.