Instructions for Reviewers

Invitation to Join MCA Volunteer Reviewer Database

If you are interested in reviewing articles for one or more of our journals, please register your contact details, including your ORCID identifier, institutional affiliation, a short CV, and 5-6 keywords in line with your expertise at the following page.

The managing editors of the selected journals will send you a notification once approved.

 

Invitation to Review

Manuscripts submitted to MCA journal are reviewed by at least two experts. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the external editor on whether a manuscript can be accepted, requires revisions or should be rejected.

We ask invited reviewers to:

accept or decline any invitations quickly, based on the manuscript title and abstract;

suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must be declined;

request an extension in case more time is required to compose a report;

let us know if anyone else, such as a student, will participate in writing the review.

As part of the assessment, reviewers will be asked:

to rate the originality, significance, quality of the presentation, scientific soundness, interest to the readers, overall merit and English level of the manuscript;

to look at the reference list of the manuscript and check if there are inappropriate self-citations;

to provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript;

to provide a detailed, constructive review report;

Potential Conflicts of Interests

We ask reviewers to inform the journal editor if they hold a conflict of interests that may prejudice the review report, either in a positive or negative way. The editorial office will check as far as possible before invitation, however we appreciate the cooperation of reviewers in this matter. Reviewers who are invited to assess a manuscript they previously reviewed for another journal should not consider this as a conflict of interest in itself. In this case, reviewers should feel free to let us know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

 

Confidentiality and Anonymity

MCA journal operates single blind peer review. Reviewers should be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors, either in their comments or in metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

Note that, as the reviewer, you will have access to other reviewers' reports via the online submission system after you have submitted your report.

 

Timely Review Reports

MCA aims to provide an efficient and high quality publishing service to authors and to the scientific community. We ask reviewers to assist by providing review reports in a timely manner. Please contact the editorial office if you require an extension to the review deadline.

 

Peer-Review and Editorial Procedure

All manuscripts sent for publication in our journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts (this includes research and review articles, spontaneous submissions, and invited papers). The Managing Editor of the journal will perform an initial check of the manuscript’s suitability upon receipt. The Editorial Office will then organize the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least two review reports per manuscript. We ask our authors for adequate revisions (with a second round of peer-review if necessary) before a final decision is made. The final decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief of a journal.

 

Rating the Manuscript

Please rate the following aspects of the manuscript:

  • Originality/Novelty: Is the question original and well defined? Do the results provide an advance in current knowledge?
  • Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses and speculations carefully identified as such?
  • Quality of Presentation: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented appropriately? Are the highest standards for presentation of the results used?
  • Scientific Soundness: is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Are the data robust enough to draw the conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results?
  • Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the Journal? Will the paper attract a wide readership, or be of interest only to a limited number of people? (please see the Aims and Scope of the journal)
  • Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work provide an advance towards the current knowledge? Do the authors have addressed an important long-standing question with smart experiments?
  • English Level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?

Manuscripts submitted to MCA journal should meet the highest standards of publication ethics:

  • Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.
  • Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse text from another source without appropriate citation.

 

If reviewers become aware of such scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behavior related to the manuscript, they should raise these concerns with the in-house editor immediately.

Overall Recommendation

Please provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript as follows:

  • Accept: The paper is accepted without any further changes.
  • Revision Require: The paper is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given seven days for minor revisions. The paper do not need another review round.
  • Resubmit for Review: The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised.  Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within two weeks and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.
  • Reject: The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, and the paper is rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.