Peer Review Policy
All manuscripts are subject to double-blind peer review and are expected to meet standards of academic excellence. If approved by the editor, submissions will be considered by peer reviewers, whose identities will remain anonymous to the authors.
Double-Blind Peer Review Process and Manuscript Assessment
Sports Sciences and Physical Education Review follows double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewer and author's identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.
To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. To help with this preparation, please ensure the following when submitting to SSPER:
- Submit the Title Page containing the Authors' details and Blinded Manuscript with no author details as a second separate file via OJS. An e-mail is then forwarded to the corresponding author, and an ID is assigned to the manuscript as an acknowledgment.
The Editorial Committee tracks every article received to review it. The Editorial Board comprises an internal committee that primarily works on examining the following in the initial desk review:
- Aims and Scope of the manuscript.
- Structure, Quality, Originality, and formatting of the manuscript.
- Our anti-plagiarism program (Turnitin) scans all articles on submission and during the review process, and the report generated is fully evaluated by the Editorial Team. If the amount of plagiarized text is greater than 20%, the authors are notified and urged to make changes to their manuscript. According to the publication standards adopted by JEMI (following the COPE standards), if serious plagiarism is detected in the manuscript content or part thereof, the paper is immediately rejected.
- After a successful desk review, each paper is sent to two independent reviewers for an elaborative blind review.
[The double-blind review process is a review process in which manuscripts are sent to the external reviewer(s) without revealing the author(s) identity to ensure independent review and avoid any potential conflict of interest].
Revision
In cases where only minor or major revisions are recommended, the associate editor requests the author(s) to revise the paper before referring it to the section editor. In cases of conflicting review reports or where there are one or more recommendations for rejection, the section editor will be requested for their judgment before a decision about revisions is communicated to authors.
Revised versions of manuscripts may or may not be sent to reviewers, depending on whether the reviewer requested to see the revised version. By default, reviewers who request major revisions or recommend rejection will be sent the revised manuscript. All reviewers can access the most recent version of the manuscript via OJS.
Editorial Decisions:
Acceptance decisions on manuscripts are made by the Editor after peer review once a minimum of two review reports have been received. When making a 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 selects from the following options: Accept in current form, accept with minor revisions, reject and decline resubmission, reject but encourage resubmission, ask the author for revision, or ask for an additional reviewer.
Reviewers make recommendations, and the editor or section editors are free to disagree with their views. If they do so, they should justify their decision for the benefit of the authors and reviewers.
