Guidelines for Reviewers

Review Guidelines

The goals of the peer review are to critically evaluate the quality of a given manuscript, highlight its strengths and weaknesses, indicate how it could be improved and help the Editorial Team of CEJISS make a decision.

A good review should:

• be critical and to the point;
• be constructive and encouraging;
• be adequately detailed;
• provide clear suggestions;
• follow the perspective deployed by the Author(s). Reviewers should minimise the following type of thinking: “If I wrote the paper, I would employ a different perspective.”

Basic requirements of CEJISS on manuscripts:

• Research goal explicitly defined
• Relationship vis-à-vis the existing literature on a given topic clearly articulated (a separate literature review section is not necessary, but it should be clear how the paper builds on the existing literature)
• Theoretical, conceptual, or methodological framework/approach explained
• The main argument and/or key conclusions explicitly stated
• CEJISS also encourages inclusive and equitable citation practices that appropriately acknowledge scholarly contributions regardless of race, gender, class, professional standing, or other categorical attributes.

When writing review reports, reviewers should consider the following:

• Does the submission represent a meaningful contribution to existing debates in International Relations and its sub-fields?
• To what extent is the article original and innovative in terms of its substance, approach and/or methodology?
• Are there any major deficiencies in terms of its theoretical, empirical, methodological, conceptual or literary content?
• Are there particular arguments or passages that need further clarification, deletion or expansion?

Reviewers can choose from the following recommendations:

• Accept: Excellent paper which can be published without revisions. CEJISS aspires to publish articles which contribute to global and regional debates in International Relations and its subfields and offer a recognisable contribution and novelty.
• Minor revisions: Very good and coherent paper with some minor flaws that should be addressed prior to publication.
• Major revisions: Potentially very good paper. The author will be encouraged to resubmit their paper taking into account the points made by the assessors. This category should be used if reviewers believe the paper has real promise, i.e. that it will pass the threshold for publication after a maximum of 2 rounds of reviews.
• Reject: a paper that makes no recognisable contribution to International Relations or its sub-fields. Good papers may still be rejected if their contribution is of marginal interest or if they are unlikely to pass the threshold for publication after a maximum of 2 rounds of reviews. If reviewers choose to reject a submission, we would still be grateful for a constructive assessment which can be forwarded to the author.

CEJISS accepts a wide range of contributions without favouring any particular theoretical or methodological tradition. It welcomes the following types of manuscripts:

• Analytical papers guided by a theoretical and/or methodological framework;
• Purely theoretical articles that aspire to create or rethink theories and concepts (even if they do not engage in extensive empirical analysis)
• Papers aspiring to make policy contribution (However, they need to satisfy academic criteria. In other words, they need to be academic/research articles in the first place.);
• Explorative papers if it is evident in which way they are innovative;
• Sophisticated synthetic and overview papers with added value and a recognisable degree of novelty;
• Innovative and even experimental types of academic writing that can offer a major contribution to debates in International Relations and its sub-fields.

Reviewers and Conflict of Interests

To understand which conflicts of interest reviewers should declare, please see the section of the Journal’s conflict of interest guidelines relevant to reviewers.

Further information