2.Pre-Check

All submitted manuscripts received by the Editorial Office will be checked by a professional in-house Managing Editor to determine whether they are properly prepared and whether they follow the ethical policies of the journal. Manuscripts that do not fit the journal's ethics policy or do not meet the standards of the journal will be rejected before peer-review. Manuscripts that are not properly prepared will be returned to the authors for revision and resubmission.

After these checks, the Managing Editor will consult the journal’s Academic Editor, i.e., the Editor-in-Chief in the case of regular submissions, or the Guest Editor in the case of Special Issue submissions, or an Editorial Board Member in case of a conflict of interest to determine whether the manuscript fits the scope of the journal and whether it is scientifically sound. No judgment on the potential impact of the work will be made at this stage.

Editors should generally not communicate directly with the authors and that is especially important if a member of the editorial board is among the authors. Thus they will not be given special treatment. Incomplete submissions may now be unsubmitted by our editorial assistant if the required documents are not supplied within 5 days to the journal.

3.Peer-Review

Once a manuscript passes the initial checks, it will be assigned to at least two external experts for peer-review. A double-blind review is applied, where reviewers do not know the names of the authors, and the authors do not know who reviewed their manuscript. Peer review comments are confidential and will only be disclosed with the express agreement of the reviewer.

In the case of regular submissions, in-house assistant editors will invite experts, including recommendations by an academic editor. These experts may also include Editorial Board members and Guest Editors of the journal. Reviewers should not have published with any of the co-authors during the past five years and should not currently work or collaborate with any of the institutions of the co-authors of the submitted manuscript. Please see Duties of Reviewers in Publication Ethics.

4.Editor Decision

Acceptance decisions on manuscripts, after peer review, are made by an academic editor, either the Editor-in-Chief, a Guest Editor, or another suitable Editorial Board member. When making an editorial decision, we expect that the academic editor checks the following:

• -The suitability of selected reviewers;
• -Adequacy of reviewer comments and author response;
• -Overall scientific quality of the paper.

The editor can select from: "acceptance without revision", "acceptance after minor revision", "reconsider after major Revisions", "rejection and encourage resubmission" and "rejection"

4.1.Acceptance without revision: These papers are received and published as they are received.

4.2. Acceptance after Minor Revisions: The paper is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.

4.3.Reconsider after Major Revisions: 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. Usually, only one round of major revisions is allowed. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within a suitable time frame, and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.

4.4.Rejection and Encourage Resubmission: If additional studies or experiences are needed to support the conclusions, the manuscript will be rejected and the authors will be encouraged to re-submit the paper once further studies or experiences have been conducted.

4.5.Rejection: The article has serious flaws, and/or makes no original significant contribution. No offer of resubmission to the journal is provided.

For the 'rejected' papers, a letter of rejection is sent to the corresponding under by the name of Editor-in-Chief with reasons for rejection. Comments from reviewers are not included. The usual reasons of rejection are insufficient originality, serious scientific flaws, poor quality of illustrations, improper manuscript format. Though the peer review process may in general take three weeks after submission of the manuscript, longer review period may be needed to finalize the review process.

If there is any suspicion that a paper may contain plagiarism, the editorial office will check again using the  iThenticate software.

Reviewers make recommendations, and Editor-in-Chief is free to disagree with their views. If they do so, they should justify their decision, for the benefit of the authors.

Editorial independence is extremely important and no side party can interfere with editorial decisions (such as Publisher). In particular, no paper is published without the agreement of an academic editor and journal staff do not advise academic editors about accepting or rejecting articles.

Management & Economics Research Journal staff or editorial board members (including Editor-in-Chief) are not involved in the processing their own academic work. Their submissions are assigned to at least two independent outside reviewers. Decisions are made by other editorial board members who do not have a conflict of interest with the author, please see Editors and journal staff as authors in Publication Ethics.

5.Revision

It is uncommon for a paper to be accepted for publication without changes – most papers are revised at least once in light of comments from reviewers and editors.

When a revised paper is received:

• -Minor changes will usually be assessed directly by the editor;
• -If significant revisions were requested, the editor will usually return the manuscript to the original reviewers (unless they opted out of this).

Rarely, the editor may invite comments from a new reviewer – the editor should explain why this fresh review is sought. It is important new reviewers respect previous review comments and the efforts the author has made to revise the paper

Ideally, any significant changes should already have been requested in the original review – this subsequent review should be to ensure that the changes have been made, rather than for raising additional issues.

Thus the review of a revised manuscript should be relatively quick and may only involve checking that certain requested actions have been done. Nevertheless, the aim of the review remains the same: to ensure the paper is of a publishable standard.

Usually the editor will provide both the original decision letter and the author’s response to it. This will allow you to see what changes were requested –including any by the other reviewer– and how the author has responded to those changes.

You should focus on how the author has changed the paper in light of their own response comments. It is very important for the author to highlight the changes in their revised manuscript, which simplifies this.

6.Production

Management & Economics Research Journal carries out production on all manuscripts, including language editing, copy editing and conversion to PDF. Language editing is carried out by professional English/Arabic editing staff.

Editorial workflow