Handling Editor Guidelines

We encourage our editors to familiarize themselves with the Cad_Lin policies and author guidelines before the review process begins.

Editor’s role and responsibilities

The role of an editor includes:

• Assessing manuscripts for their suitability for peer review, selecting suitable reviewers who meet the requirements of your journal, and making editorial decisions based on the reports of the peer reviewers and your own assessment.
• Advocating the journal to colleagues/peers and encouraging high quality submissions and highlighting the ethos, scope, and aims of your journal.
• Writing occasional reviews or commentaries for your journal upon invitation.
• Providing feedback and suggesting improvements for your journal.
• Highlighting topic- or discussion-worthy content in your journal.
• Adherence to editorial good practice standards, according to the editorial policies of your journal and publisher, and guidelines and best practice recommendations issued by organizations such as the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE).

Assessing a new manuscript

Is the manuscript within your area of expertise?

If a manuscript does not fall within your area of expertise, you may need to invite a colleague to act as the editor of that manuscript.

Do you have a competing interest that prevents you from handling the manuscript?

It is not just the authors who may have competing interests. Editors and reviewers may also have competing interests. For an editor, a competing interest exists if their handling of a manuscript could be influenced by their relationship with the authors (e.g. if they have collaborated or competed with the authors) or by a personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations. If you have a competing interest with the manuscript or an author, ensure that this is declared when first assigned, as the manuscript may need to be reassigned to another editor.

Is the manuscript within Cad_Lin's scope?

If a manuscript is deemed as out of scope for Cad_Lin, you should reject it. The procedures for rejecting a paper are described below.

Is the manuscript sufficiently scientifically sound?

• In your initial assessment, does it appear that the conclusions are supported by the data, appropriate methods and controls have been used, and any limitations are clearly stated?
• If not, please provide comments to the authors to support your decision to reject without peer review. The procedures for rejecting a paper are described below.
• If you feel that the manuscript could be revised to address your concerns, then you can request that the authors revise before sending the manuscript for peer review.

Do you see any ethical problems with the manuscript?

Cad_Lin defends the principles of the declaration of ethics and good practices in publication, based on the Code of Conduct and Standards of Good Practice for Committee Editors of the Committee on Ethics in Publication - COPE. Please carefully review Cad_Lin's ethics recommendations to determine whether there is any ethical problem with the manuscript.

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data must have been conducted in accordance with the principles of respect of persons, beneficence, and justice as outlined by the Belmont Report. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and the authors should include a statement within the article text detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval. The identity of the research subject should be anonymized whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent must be obtained from the participants (or their legal guardians).

Is the article category correct for the content?

It is important for journal indexing that articles are designated as the correct category. Occasionally, a submission will not fall into one to the article categories available on the journal, but may be of sufficient interest to consider for peer review.

Language concerns

If you receive a new manuscript that requires language copyediting before you are able to sufficiently assess the scientific content, you can request this from the authors as a prereview revision.

We do not encourage rejection of a manuscript on the basis of the language concerns alone, unless it is of very poor quality or the authors have had an opportunity to improve the manuscript but have not met the required standard. At the same time, editors and reviewers are not expected to copyedit the language themselves. Instead, authors should be asked to seek help from a professional language editing service as part of their revisions or before sending for review, if necessary.

Handling reviews

There are two types of reviews for manuscripts submitted to Cad_Lin: public reviews and peer-reviews. Public reviews and peer reviews must be taken into account when making a decision.

Handling Public Reviews

All manuscripts submitted to Cad_Lin have previously been deposited by the authors in a pre-print server that supports public commenting. The DOI of the pre-print is given at the bottom of the manuscript.

Editors are expected to promote the preprint of an article that is under review and encourage members of the scientific community to comment on the preprint. All the exchanges in public reviews should also be considered by editors as basis for their final decision.

Criteria for a suitable reviewer

• Active in a relevant field and/or methodology as judged by their publication record.
• Ideally published more than 10 articles in the last 10 years.
• Not too senior as they are likely to be very busy.
• Free of potential bias, i.e.
• No co-publication with an author of the submitted manuscript in the last 5 years
• Not currently or recently affiliated at the same institution (i.e. within the past year)
• Reviewers should be ‘independent’ of one another i.e. not both work at the same lab/institution.
• Some manuscripts may require the specialized skills of a statistician, whom you may need to invite if the other reviewers cannot judge the statistics.

Finding potential reviewers

We recommend that you invite six reviewers at a time to get at least two reviewers to agree to review a manuscript. However, in some cases you may need to invite more, particularly if it is a busy time of year. Please invite reviewers directly by e-mail.

You may wish to use the following methods and tools to supplement your own knowledge of researchers in the field.

1. Related articles. You can search Google Scholar for keywords and titles similar to the title of the manuscript under consideration.
2. Reference list of the manuscript. This is useful for finding active authors in the field or reviewers with specific methodological expertise.

Please also consider diversity in terms of geographic area, gender and other characteristics in your suggested reviewers. Cad_Lin encourages editors to nominate and involve early-career researchers in the review process. This is an excellent opportunity to provide outstanding early-stage researchers with the opportunity to peer review manuscripts.

To be eligible, researchers have to be either a doctoral or a postdoctoral researcher with at least two publications in an area of research within the scope of the paper to be reviewed.

Cad_Lin also encourages reviewers to involve early-career colleagues as co-reviewers. A co-reviewer is a researcher, often more junior in their career, or a technician who evaluates an article alongside a more senior (invited) reviewer. It is a valuable learning experience that we are pleased to support when used properly. The senior reviewer can only have one adequately competent co-reviewer. In addition, co-reviewing is an excellent way to mentor new reviewers. An invited reviewer can co-review a manuscript with a co-reviewer, as long as they tell the journal when they agree to review. The completed reviewer report form should be submitted to the journal, including the name and affiliation(s) of the co-reviewer within the ‘Comments to the Editor’ box of the form. We will then add their details to our database and send them an email to say thanks. The senior reviewer should be the primary point of contact for the review and is ultimately responsible for it. The senior reviewer and co-reviewer should agree on the phrasing of the review, and both reviewers must follow the same rules about competing interests.

Do encourage reviewers to involve co-reviewers when sending an invitation message.

See the section below “What to do if...” for more tips on how to find reviewers.

Make sure to inform potential reviewers that Cad_Lin follows the principles of Open Science and that all reviews are open and transparent. The reviews are published and the reviewers receive credit for their important contribution to science. Please, ask reviewers to read all relevant information about the review process, including the reviewers' guidelines.

Adding a reviewer into the system

Once the reviewers accept to revise the manuscript, please add them as reviewers in the system. In order to do so, log in into the system, find the paper you’re editing in the Submissions tab, click on View and, under the Review tab select Add Reviewer. You can try to locate the reviewers using the search function, and if successful, add them using the Enroll Existing User button. If a reviewer isn’t registered into the system, you can do it yourself using the function Create New Reviewer, on the bottom of the window that was opened when you select the button Add Reviewer. The required information is as follows: Name, Surname, Username and Email. In the field Review Form, select the option Review. After that, select the option Add Reviewer at the bottom of the window when all fields are filled in correctly.

Monitoring deadlines

Please make sure that reviewers submit their reports on time – this is extremely important for the editorial process. It is recommended that you contact the reviewers two days before the deadline with a gentle reminder. If you do not hear from the reviewer after the deadline, please inquire but try to assign another reviewer immediately, in case you have not secured at least two reviews.

Assessing peer-reviews

As soon as reviews are added into the system, you should read them, by selecting the option Read Review. If you agree with a review and its decision, please select the option Confirm. After confirming the acceptance of the review, please make sure to thank the reviewer, by selecting the option Thank Reviewer. By doing so, the reviewer will receive a certificate.

Making a decision

Recommendations (reject, revise or accept) should be made on the basis of at least 2 reviewer reports and your own reading of the manuscript.

You should be aware that a reviewer may flag an issue not raised by the other reviewer because they have more expertise in a particular aspect. If there are any issues that you think the authors should focus on which have not been raised by the reviewers, you can include these in the comments to the authors or in the decision email.

Rejecting a manuscript

When recommending rejection, whether before or after peer review, it is important to provide authors with reasons for rejection and feedback that they can utilize in future work. Therefore, we recommend that you always provide comments explaining your reasoning to the authors when rejecting manuscripts.

To reject a manuscript, select "Reject Submission" when making the recommendation, and include a decision letter outlining the reasons.

Requesting revisions

If you believe that the manuscript has the potential for publication but requires changes, you can invite the authors to revise it.

Select "Request Modifications" when making the recommendation and include a decision letter summarizing the main reasons for revisions. Please refer to reviewers comments.

Authors will have 15 days to resubmit the revised manuscript. They are requested to send a cover letter responding to all reviewer reports and summarizing the changes made to the manuscript. Revised manuscripts will be posted both as a new preprint version and at Cad_Lin's system, under the section "Revisions." Please do not continue the review process if these conditions are not met.

The revised manuscript should be reassigned to the original reviewers if possible. To do so, select the "New Review Round" option. A new round will be created. Ensure that the revised paper and the cover letter are added to this new round. Then, repeat the same procedure as described above to designate reviewers for this new round.

At this point, initiating a discussion may be highly advisable if you believe it would benefit the manuscript's quality or if clarification on particular points is needed. Reviewers may have differing opinions about the papers they review, and it can often be unclear why a paper is rejected by one reviewer but not by another. Open peer review supports improved consistency and reduces the chance of bias by capturing and comparing more reviewers' views for a given paper.

You may make a new decision based on the reviewer’s assessment of the revised manuscript or request input from additional reviewers. If neither you nor the reviewers are satisfied with the revised version, you may either request further revisions or decline the manuscript.

Accepting a Manuscript

When the manuscript meets the required standards and all concerns raised during the evaluation process have been adequately addressed, you can recommend its acceptance for publication. To recommend acceptance of a manuscript, click on "Make Recommendation" and select the "Accept Submission" option. The decision letter must include a brief paragraph highlighting the relevance of the article to the field of knowledge, thereby justifying its publication. Additionally, incorporate the public opinions issued into the letter. This content will be published as an evaluation of the article. If deemed appropriate, you may adjust the tone and consistency of the public opinions to align with the overall text of the evaluation. Ensure that submission options to editors remain unchanged.

What to do if...

You cannot find enough reviewers.

Additional tools to help you search for reviewers

Google Scholar - This searches the full text of each article, not just the abstract, and covers all topics across scholarly literature. Using the advanced search, you can restrict the search to certain journals, dates, and authors.

Tips:

You can see which articles cited an article. This is especially useful to follow up 'seminal' articles or to look for those who have cited similar recent work by the same authors, as they will already be familiar with the work of the authors.

In the advanced search, if you type two authors into the author box, it will bring up articles they have written together, e.g. “Joe Bloggs” “John Doe” will find articles by both of those authors.

...Reviewers disagree/you disagree with the reviewers.

When reviewers disagree in their assessment of the work, you may be able to reach a decision by taking into account your own knowledge of the subject area and interpretation of the manuscript together with the expertise of the reviewers.

If you are unsure, you can seek the advice of an independent third reviewer or request that the Editors-in-Chief or a member of the Editorial Board help adjudicate the conflicting reports. If the authors have already revised in response to initial reviews, it is preferable to seek further advice on specific points of disagreement only (an adjudication) rather than seeking a whole new report.

...One round of revision isn’t enough

If you or the reviewers still have concerns after the authors have revised the manuscript you can send it back for further revision. We recommend that the decision be made immediately after a maximum of three rounds of revision to avoid lengthy peer review, which can become frustrating for authors and reviewers alike. If the work is not suitable for publication after the authors have made two revisions, then it is often better to close the file (although this should be assessed on a case-by-case basis). If further revision would not make the manuscript acceptable, it should be rejected without an offer to resubmit, that is, 'close reject' rather than ‘open reject’.

...You think there might be an ethical concern

If the manuscript lacks information on ethical approval and / or consent,

Ask the authors to add it into the manuscript before sending for review. If they did not receive ethical approval, author consent, do not reject the manuscript as further investigation may be necessary. If you are not sure how to investigate, you may wish to consult the Editors-in-Chief.

Authorship changes

If the authors would like to add, remove or alter the order of authors on the manuscript, confirmation must be received from all authors (including those unaffected by the change). If the authors cannot agree, this matter should be referred to the institution where the research was carried out, as editors are not in a position to investigate and resolve authorship issues.