Editorial Review Policy
Initially, all submissions to AFJHMS journal are reviewed for completeness and only then submitted to be evaluated by an editor who determines if they are appropriate for peer review.
If an editor is on the list of authors or has some other competitive interest in a particular manuscript, peer review oversight will be delegated to another member of the Editorial Board. When making a decision, editors will consider the peer-reviewed papers but are not bound by the views or recommendations therein but the decisions should be based solely on the merit of the manuscript. The Editor in chief is also driven by editorial policy and legal regulations relating to defamation, breach of copyright, and plagiarism while making a decision. No conflicting interest can occur between the members of the Editorial Board including Editor in chief, concerning the articles considered for publication. Members who agree that they might be considered to be participating in such a dispute do not engage in a specific manuscript’s decision process.
Information and concepts contained in the manuscript submitted must be kept confidential without the written permission of the authors, information, and ideas found in unpublished materials must not be used for personal gain. Editors and editorial staff shall take all appropriate steps to ensure that, during, and after the assessment process, the authors/reviewers remain confidential, in compliance with the form of review in use. The Editorial Board is obligated to provide additional information on the manuscript to the reviewers, including the results of the manuscript plagiarism result.
The Review Process
The editorial staff is responsible for reading all submitted manuscripts. Only those papers that seem most likely to meet our editorial requirements are submitted for formal peer review to save time for authors and peer – reviewers. Those papers found by the editors to be of inadequate general interest or otherwise unacceptable are immediately rejected without external scrutiny (desk rejection). For formal peer review, manuscripts deemed to be of potential interest to our readership are normally sent to two anonymous reviewers, but sometimes more if special advice is needed. Reviewers’ comments are then sent to the corresponding author for necessary actions and responses. The editors then make a decision based on the reviewers’ advice, from among several possibilities:
Review outcomes:-
- Accept: The manuscript is publishable in the current format
- Accept with minor revision: To instruct the authors to revise their manuscript to address specific concerns before a final decision is reached
- Accept with major revision: To instruct the authors to revise their manuscript to address major concerns before a final decision is reached
- Reject, manuscript typically on grounds of specialist interest, lack of novelty, insufficient conceptual advance or major technical and/or interpretational problems
Reviewers are welcome to propose a specific course of action, but they should bear in mind that there may be different technical knowledge and/or opinions among the other reviewers of a particular article, and the editors may have to make a decision based on contradictory advice.
Editorial decisions are based on an assessment of the strength of the arguments posed by each reviewer and by the authors, and other information not available to either party may also be considered. Our primary commitments are to our readers and the scientific community at large, and we must balance the arguments of each paper against the many others also under consideration in determining how best to represent them.
A pre-print proof is submitted to the author for final proof correction and approval after the manuscript has been finalized and all the review comments have been corrected to the satisfaction of both the reviewers and editors.
The manuscript is formatted as PDF files for publication after proof corrections are made by the author on the final version (Preprint Proof) of the manuscript. We do our best to screen the manuscript for peer review from the Submission before publication and at any time if the manuscript is found to be inconsistent in its content/violation of the author’s embargo / unethical practice, etc., then the author will be asked to rectify/explain it, then the manuscript would be held from publishing.
