REVIEWERS’ POLICY

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1. All reviewers  are the researchers with PhD or postdoc degrees (or national equivalents) who have been involved in research activities in the scope of TRACES and have at least 5  publications in the last 5 years.

2. In some cases, the Committee members may also serve as anonymous reviewers, under the same conditions as for all other reviewers.

3. The main functions of an anonymous/blind reviewer is reviewing materials submitted before deadlines (full text) in a timely manner and providing recommendations on their improvement (if applicable).

4. Every full text submission delivered to the Committee is first subject to plagiarism check, then to desk review carried out by the Committee and only then is passed, in an anonymized, coded form, to a blind review.

5. Double-blind review may take from 5 to 15 days (according to deadlines set).

6. The Committee is responsible for making the report on each submission, stemming from the results of double-blind review. The report is then delivered to the author(s), in case of both positive and negative results.

7. In cases when corrections and improvements are required on the author’s side as a result of blind review, the author has max 7 days for updating the text. In case the author is unable to meet this deadline (for any reason), the Committee reserves the right to remove the submission from the conference. Notification on this removal shall be instantly delivered to the corresponding author.

8. In case of negative results of the blind review, the corresponding author has 5 business days for filing an appeal. Appeal can be made only once and must be thoroughly grounded.

9. In case reviewer(s) and Committee members agree on the negative decision regarding the text, the submission is completely withdrawn from the database, unless the corresponding author chooses to appeal.

10. In case of contradictions/doubts among the reviewers, the final decision belongs to the Committee members.

 

REVIEWING PROCEDURES

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Final decision on a blind review should stem from the following requirements:

- The article’s central topic matches the TRACES scope

- Problem of the research is relevant and promising 

- Article’s structure is exact and logical

- Research methods are adequate to the topic and to the field and are also advanced; applied data is sufficient in volume and is not outdated

- Results and conclusions in the article demonstrate theoretical significance, practical importance, obvious novelty and originality

- Text readability is sufficiently high.

- Each of these requirements has to be separately assessed by the reviewer using the scale from 4 to 1 (4 being the highest score, and 1 — the lowest).

- Additional feedback from the reviewer should be provided in separate blocks for commenting.

 

One of the following five decisions should be finalized on each text under blind review:

- Accepted in the initial version

- Accepted with minor corrections

- Preliminary accepted, requiring major corrections and second round for review 

- Rejected.