Guidelines for Reviewers – Marxism and Sciences

Guidelines for Reviewers*

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The editors are concerned to prevent any conflict of interest between action editors, reviewers and authors. If you believe that there may be a conflict of interest, please discuss the problem with the editor before filling in this form.

EXPERTISE OF THE REVIEWER

Please list one or more (sub-) disciplines in which you have expertise¹ that you consider relevant for the evaluation of this manuscript.	Main sciences category (natural, human or social sciences)	Level of your expertise
	Main sciences category (natural, human or social sciences)	low	medium	high

¹ The discipline/s in which you are qualified by virtue either of a university degree or publications in leading international journals.

QUANTITATIVE EVALUATION

		inadequate	acceptable	good	excellent
1	Relevance to marxism and sciences
2	Disciplinarity: Background of the article within its discipline, area or interdiscipline
4	Academic quality: Please consider originality, theoretical and practical significance, and methodological rigor, referring to the usual standards within your specific discipline or subdiscipline.
5	Originality: The originality of the contribution should be clearly expressed based on the discussion of relevant literature.
6	Presentation: Please consider grammar, readability, concision, structure, use of figures and tables, and accessibility for an interdisciplinary audience.
7	Title The title should accurately reflect the content and include the main keywords.
8	Abstract: The abstract should be structured according to the information for authors. Every point in the abstract should be expanded upon in the paper.
9	General

Accept	Publish as is
	Minor revisions: The manuscript should be acceptable for publication if your suggestions are implemented. In this case, you will not see the paper again; the editors will ensure that your recommendations are taken seriously and followed up appropriately.
	Major revisions: The manuscript might be acceptable for publication, but only after extensive revision. You may for example recommend major additions or deletions, or a major change in the organisation. If the two reviewers independently agree on this option, we will ask the authors to revise their paper, and the entire review procedure will be repeated.
Reject: The manuscript is unlikely to be publishable after revision – regardless of the nature or extent of the revisions.

QUALITATIVE EVALUATION

Marxism & Sciences regards qualitative evaluation as central to academic quality control and asks reviewers to pay special attention to this task. We would be grateful for 1-2 pages of comments:

What is good and what is not good about the submission?
What specific improvements should be made before publication?
Please distinguish between necessary and desirable revisions.

Your primary task is to evaluate the manuscript against the usual standards in your discipline(s) as set out above, but we also welcome your appraisal from the point of view of other relevant disciplines.

In any case, the primary aim of your comments should be to help the authors. Please therefore write in a friendly, helpful style, carefully avoiding personal, emotional, sarcastic or otherwise potentially offensive language.

Finally, please check that your qualitative and quantitative evaluations are consistent with each other.

* This guideline was written based on the guidelines of the Journal of Interdsiciplinary Music Studies and published in 15.02.2021.