Invitation to Join Zentime Volunteer Reviewer Database

If you are interested in reviewing articles for one or more of our journals, please provide your contact details, including your institutional affiliation, a short CV, and 5-6 keywords in line with your expertise for the registration in following website: http://www.zentimepublishing.com/home/join/index/cid/4/sid/0. We will send you a notification once approved.

Invitation to Review

Manuscripts submitted to Zentime are reviewed by at least two experts. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of and make comments on the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the editor on whether a manuscript shall be accepted, needs revisions or should be rejected.

Specifically, invited reviewers should:

a. Accept or decline any invitations quickly, based on her/his own expertise, the manuscript title and abstract;

b. Recommend alternative reviewers if appropriate;

c. Request an extension if the review cannot be completed in due time;

d. Let us know if anyone else, such as a colleague or student has participated in the review.

As part of the assessment, reviewers should:

a. Provide an overall recommendation for the manuscript (can be accepted, requires minor or major revisions or should be rejected);

b. Rate the originality, significance, quality of the presentation, scientific soundness, interest to the readers, overall merit and English language of the manuscript;

c. Go through the reference list of the manuscript and check if there are incorrect or inappropriate citations;

d. Provide detailed and constructive review report/comments;

e. Alert editors that the manuscript under review is substantially similar to any published or previously submitted content.

Potential Conflicts of Interests

We seek reviewers for Zentime who do not have conflicts of interest with the authors and are familiar with the research area involved in the manuscripts they reviewed. In addition to this precaution, reviewers are required to disclose any potential conflicts with the evaluation of the paper, or withdraw their services for that manuscript if necessary, and this information is taken into account by the editors when decisions are made.

Reviewers should inform the journal editor if there is a conflict of interest that may cause prejudice to the review report, either in a positive or negative way. Despite the editorial office will check as far as possible before sending the invitation, we still greatly appreciate the cooperation from the reviewers in this matter. In the case of being invited to assess a manuscript that they previously reviewed for another journal, reviewers should feel free to let us know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

Confidentiality and Anonymity

Reviewers should keep the major content of the manuscript confidential, including the abstract. Reviewers must inform the Editorial Office if they would like a student or colleague to complete the review.

Zentime adopts the single-blind peer review process. Reviewers should be careful enough to not reveal their identities to the authors in their comments.

Timely Review Comments

Zentime aims to provide an efficient and high-quality publishing service to authors as well as the scientific community. 

We appreciate reviewers to assist us by providing review reports in a timely manner. Please contact the editorial office if you require an extension to the review deadline.

Peer-Review Procedure

All manuscripts, including Research articles, Reviews, and Brief Communications, sent for publication in our journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by the expert reviewers. Retraction and Erratum may also be peer-reviewed at the discretion of the editors.

To save time for both authors and peer-reviewers, only those papers that seem most likely to meet our publication criteria are sent for formal expert review, which is decided by Managing Editor of the journal. Those papers judged to be insufficient in general interest or inappropriate by our editors are directly rejected without external review.

Furthermore, the originality of the manuscript is assessed (Turnitin, Cross check or iThenticate) to screen the qualified papers.

Later, Editorial Office will organize the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least two review reports per manuscript (from external experts or editorial board members). The authors are asked for adequate revisions (with a second round of peer-review if necessary) before a final decision is made.

The final decision will be made by the academic editor (usually the Editor-in-Chief/Editorial Board Member of a journal or the Guest Editor of a Special Issue). Accepted articles will be copy-edited and English-edited.

For any general questions and comments about the peer-review and editorial procedures that are not addressed here, reviewers are encouraged to contact us using the feedback links or send e-mail to editorialoffice@zentimecorp.com.

Online Manuscript Review

We ask peer-reviewers to upload their review comments via our online system.

Manuscript Evaluation

The reviewers are suggested to assess the following aspects of the manuscript:

1. Originality/Novelty: Is the scientific question original and well defined? Are the results advanced compared to current knowledge?

2. Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all the conclusions justified and sufficiently supported by the results? Are the hypotheses and speculations carefully tested?

3. Quality of Presentation: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented logically? Are the results presented with high standards?

4. Scientific Soundness: Is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Are the data robust enough to draw the conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results?

5. Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the Journal? Will the paper attract a wide readership, or only limited readers? (Please see the Aims and Scope of the journal for details)

6. Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this manuscript? Does the work provide an advance towards the current knowledge? Have the authors addressed an important long-standing question with reasonable experiments?

7. English Writing: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?

Manuscripts submitted to Zentime should meet the standards of publication ethics:

1. Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.

2. Manuscripts must be original and should not re-use text from another source without appropriate citation.

3. When reporting experiments on human subjects or animals, the authors should provide an ethics statement with approval number(s) and the Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval Report/Ethic Committee Report.

4. When reporting a clinical trial, which must be registered in a recognized international registry (e.g., ClinicalTrials.gov and ISRCTN Register), the authors should provide the name of the registry, the trial number, and the trial URL.

If reviewers are aware of such scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behaviors related to the manuscript, they should raise concern with the editors immediately.