Peer Review Process

All papers submitted to JHMTR are subject to a single-blind peer-reviewing procedure, it means that Authors' identities are known to reviewers. The existence of a submitted manuscript will not be disclosed to anyone other than reviewers and editors. Our editorial decision on each article is based on initial editor processing and refereeing by expert reviewers. Review times often differ depending on the subject area of the paper. All manuscripts submitted to JHMTR must be original contributions, and must not be under consideration for publication with another journal, nor have been previously published, in part or whole. The Journal decision-making process includes the following steps:

 

Registration and Submission

Registration in the Journal’s website by the corresponding author and providing the full affiliation of all authors. Hereinafter, the paper with the proper format, as requested by the journal, can be submitted to the journal.

 

Structural Assessment

The journal director inspects the article in regards to journal guidelines implementation and containing all the needed data and files. In this step, the manuscript might be un-submitted and returned to authors to add the lacked material or to imply adjustment following journal guidelines.

 

Editor-in-Chief Assessment and Processing

The Editor-in-Chief inspects the manuscript in regards to the journal scope, originality, and impact. Taking into consideration that this is the first quality assessment checkpoint, the article might be rejected, or adjustments might be suggested by the editor at this step.

 

Check for Plagiarism

At this step, the manuscript is inspected for plagiarism, and depending on the similarity check software report by iThenticate, the manuscript is either progressed into the review phase or rejected due to similarities. The acceptable similarity percentage is less than 30%.

 

Reviewers Suggestion and Invitation

The editor in chief in this stage can directly send invitations to experts in the field. The editor in chief might also consult more specialized associated editors to nominate reviewers. The invitation procedure continues until two reviewers accept the invitation (the manuscript state is changed to under review). In some cases (advanced methods and a delicate case of studies), more reviewers might be invited.

 

First Decision after Review

Depending on reviewers evaluation report for the article (additional reviewer might be invited in case of conflict between reviewers’ reports), one of four decisions are to be made by the journal board:

 

  • Acceptance
  • Minor revision required
  • Major revision required
  • Rejection
  • This decision is sent to the corresponding author along with reviewers’ reports to help revision procedure or to explain the rejection decision.

Revision and Re-submission

After a proper revision, the author resubmits the manuscript along with complimentary data if needed. Furthermore, the author should provide a complete report of the new adjustments in light of the reviewer’s requests and answers for the editor or reviewers’ questions. The author has the right to reject one or more of the revisions. However, he/she should provide an explanation for this rejection or suggest other adjustments.

 

Final Decision

After revisions, the final decision is to be made by the journal board. If the revision was satisfactory, the manuscript is accepted and sent for the publisher.