Peer Review Process

All manuscripts submitted to Animal Reports undergo a stringent single-blind peer review process (Anonymous peer review), which aims to publish the high quality of papers and ensure truthful and accurate reporting of the research work.

Manuscript handling workflow

Upon submission, articles are prechecked by one of the editorial team, who checks for the alignment of the MS with editorial policy and author guidelines, including ethical consideration, potential conflict of interest and originality using Crossref Similarity Check (powered by iThenticate). Papers that pass the technical check passed to the Editor-in-Chief for initial review.

1.      The Editor-in-Chief carefully evaluates each manuscript to determine if its topic, content, and presentation are suitable for consideration.

2.      Qualified manuscripts are then assigned to an academic/section editor according to his or her respective areas of expertise.

3.      The academic/section editor invites external-independent reviewers who are suitably qualified to assess the paper.

4.      Reviewers are asked to evaluate the manuscript’s originality, methodology, contribution to the literature, presentation of results and support for the conclusion, and appropriate referencing of previous relevant studies.

5.      Post-evaluation by the reviewers, the manuscript is sent back to authors to revise their MS and reply for the reviewers, then the academic/section editor evaluate the updated MS and reputable letters to assure that all reported issues are resolved. In this point, an intial decision can be made or the MS sent for second round of evaluation.

6.      The final decision is made by Editor-in-Chief, who makes one of the following recommendations: Accept in the current form, required minor revisions, Required major revisions, or reject.

-     In case of acceptance in the current form, the manuscript will be handed over to the copyediting and production team.

-     In case of minor revisions, authors have up to 4 days to revise and resubmit the manuscript.

-     In case of major revisions, authors have up to 10 days to edit and resubmit the manuscript.

-     In case of rejection, the manuscript will be rejected outright, and the author will be notified of the decision.

Invitation to Review

The reviewers are suggested by the editor-in-chief/ academic editor/section editor during the preliminary check or selected from the journal database based on the MS specialty. The authors asked to submit a list of reviewers with full details to enrich the journal database. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and to provide a comprehensive recommendation to the editor on whether a manuscript should be accepted, requires revisions (Major or minor), or should be rejected.

The invited reviewers ask to:

ü  Accept or decline any invitations as soon as possible (based on the manuscript title and abstract). In case of decline he can suggest alternative reviewers.

ü  Request an extension deadline as soon as possible in case more time is required to provide a comprehensive report. The expected review time is 10-15 days.

Specific reviewing criteria

Review reports should:

The review report must be prepared in clear English. We have listed some general instructions regarding the review report for your consideration below. To begin with, please consider the following guidelines:

ü  Read the whole article as well as the supplementary material, if there is any, paying close attention to the figures, tables, data, and methods.

ü  Your report should critically analyze the article as a whole but also specific sections and the key concepts presented in the article.

ü  Please ensure your comments are detailed so that the authors may correctly understand and address the points you raise.

ü  Please maintain a neutral tone and focus on providing constructive criticism that will help the authors improve their work. Derogatory comments will not be tolerated.

ü  Review reports should contain a brief summary (one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper, its main contributions and strengths.

ü  Review reports should contain general concept comments:

- Article: highlighting areas of weakness, the testability of the hypothesis, methodological inaccuracies, missing controls, etc.

- Review: commenting on the completeness of the review topic covered, the relevance of the review topic, the gap in knowledge identified, the appropriateness of references, etc. These comments are focused on the scientific content of the manuscript and should be specific enough for the authors to be able to respond.

ü  Specific comments referring to line numbers, tables or figures that point out inaccuracies within the text or sentences that are unclear. These comments should also focus on the scientific content and not on spelling, formatting or English language problems, as these can be addressed at a later stage by our internal staff.

Review Reports should not:

ü  Reviewers must not recommend citation of work by themselves, close colleagues, another author, or the journal when it is not clearly necessary to improve the quality of the manuscript under review.

ü  Reviewers must not recommend excessive citation of their work (self-citations), another author’s work (honorary citations) or articles from the journal where the manuscript was submitted as a means of increasing the citations of the reviewer/authors/journal. You can provide references as needed, but they must clearly improve the quality of the manuscript under review.

ü  GenAI tools and other large language models (LLMs) should not be used by reviewers in the preparation of review reports. Reviewers are solely responsible for the content of their reports, and the utilization of these tools may violate confidentiality, proprietary, and data privacy rights. Some limited use to improve the written quality of the peer-review report, such as checking grammar, structure, spelling, punctuation, and formatting, may be acceptable, but should be disclosed upon submission of the peer-review report.

ü  Reviewers should not upload manuscripts under any circumstances, either in whole or in part; images; figures; tables; or any kind of communication related to manuscripts under review to any GenAI tools. If it is determined that AI tools have been inappropriately used in review report preparation, the report will be discarded.

- General questions to help guide your review report for research articles:

ü  Is the manuscript clear, relevant for the field and presented in a well-structured manner?

ü  Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years) and relevant? Does it include an excessive number of self-citations?

ü  Is the manuscript scientifically sound and is the experimental design appropriate to test the hypothesis?

ü  Are the manuscript’s results reproducible based on the details given in the methods section?

ü  Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate? Do they properly show the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand? Is the data interpreted appropriately and consistently throughout the manuscript? Please include details regarding the statistical analysis or data acquired from specific databases.

ü  Are the conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented?

ü  Please evaluate the ethics statements and data availability statements to ensure they are adequate.

- General questions to help guide your review report for review articles:

ü  Is the review clear, comprehensive and of relevance to the field? Is a gap in knowledge identified?

ü  Was a similar review published recently and, if yes, is this current review still relevant and of interest to the scientific community?

ü  Are the statements and conclusions drawn coherent and supported by the listed citations?

ü  Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate? Do they properly show the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand? Did it have enough resolution to be printed without any mistakes.

ü  Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years) and relevant? Are any relevant citations omitted? Does it include an excessive number of self-citations?

ü  If the reviewer becomes aware of any scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behavior related to the manuscript, they should raise these concerns to the editor immediately.

Rating the Manuscript

The manuscript must also be rated numerically (0-5) to facilitate the editorial judgment on the general quality, please rate the following aspects:

ü  Scope: Does the work fit the journal scope? (Please see the Aims and Scope of the journal.)

ü  Novelty: Is the question original and well-defined? Do the results provide an advancement of the current knowledge?

ü  Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses carefully identified as such?

ü  Quality: 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?

ü  Scientific Soundness: Is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Is the data robust enough to draw conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results? Is the raw data available and correct (where applicable)?

ü  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?

ü  Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work advance the current knowledge? Do the authors address an important long-standing question with smart experiments? Do the authors present a negative result of a valid scientific hypothesis?

ü  English level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?

Final Recommendation

Please provide an overall recommendation for the next processing stage of the manuscript as follows:

1.      Accept in current Form: The paper can be accepted without any further changes.

2.      Minor corrections: The paper can in principle be accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.

3.      Major corrections: 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. A maximum of two rounds of major revision per manuscript is normally provided. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within ten days and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.

4.      Reject: The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, and the paper may be rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.

Appeal

Authors of rejected submissions may make an appeal in writing to animal.reports.journal@gmail.com, in which specific reasons for the appeal and a detailed response to the reviewers’ suggestions are included.

Decisions made on appeals by the Editor-in-Chief are final and no further considerations will be made.

Confidentiality

Reviewers are asked not to distribute copies of the manuscript or use results contained in it without the authors’ permission. However, they are free to show it to knowledgeable colleagues and consult them about the review. Suggestions for alternative reviewers are helpful to the Editors and would be appreciated.

Our editors are not involved in making decisions about papers which:

- They have written themselves.

- Have been written by family members or colleagues.

- Relate to products or services in which they have an interest.

Technicalities

We ask reviewers to return their reports within the specifies deadline or inform the Editor as soon as possible if they are not able to do so. Reviewer reports can be submitted via online submission system.

Special issues and article collections

The peer review process for special issues and article collections follows the same process as outlined above for regular submissions, except, a guest editor may send the submissions out to the reviewers and may recommend a decision to the journal editor. The journal editor oversees the peer review process of all special issues and article collections to ensure the high standards of publishing ethics and responsiveness are respected and is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles.