Meet Our Review Board

Learn more about the experts who review our articles to make sure they are accurate and trustworthy.

How do we Review and cite our articles?

Before going into how we review and cite our articles, we find it important to explain how indexed scientific articles make their way into journals and how it is important to discern the quality of a cited article.

About indexed scientific journals and open access.

In academia, there is a consensus that the indexing of a journal is considered an indication of its quality. Indexed journals are considered of higher scientific quality compared to non-indexed journals (Dhammi and Haq, 2016).

Recent bibliometric studies show that the number of published scientific articles has increased by 8-9% each year in recent decades (Landhuis, 2016). With this, it becomes essential to be able to identify which publications are in fact relevant, and which articles were written with enough scientific rigour.

Some tools are used to assess the quality of journals and scientific publications and their authors, highlighting: the number of citations of the article in a period of time, and indexing databases of journals, such as Web of Science, Scopus and Pubmed.

But what is indexing?

A citation index is an ordered list of cited articles, each accompanied by a list of cited articles. The cited article is identified as the source and the cited article as the reference.

An indexer provides an index of the content of each issue published during a calendar year of selected journals. The journals covered by the index are chosen by advisory boards of experts on each of the topics represented and by large-scale citation analyses (Garfield, 1970).

Periodicals hire indexers to expand their dissemination because, through indexing, data can be crossed between authors of a certain published article, their references, citations, accesses made to that article and area of knowledge.

Publication in indexed journals is widely used as a criterion for hiring or promoting academic professionals worldwide (Natarajan, 2016).

The main indexers of scientific journals are Medline, Elsevier’s Embase and Scopus, EBSCO Publishing’s Electronic Databases, and Scirus among others.

Free access to journals has become a way of quickly disseminating scientific knowledge, especially for researchers from developing countries.

The so-called open-access journals charge authors for their publications, but the lack of resources is not an impediment to the publication of articles of high scientific value, since authors can receive sponsorship from entities and companies to have their research published in an open-access network.

Being open access is not a quality criterion for a journal, because, due to the lack of resources that began with the dissemination of information over the internet, many journals, with selected high-quality editorial boards, became open access or hybrids, providing a form of paid or unpaid publication.

Poor-quality journals are, for the most part, open access, but the opposite is false (O’Kelly et al., 2019).

The first platform used for scientific search is the Web of Science (WoS), and it is one of the most used worldwide (Li et al., 2018). This search engine gathers about 34,000 scientific journals and covers over 75 million records, more than 101,000 books and over 8 million conference papers (Birkle et al., 2020).

About 23 % of the publications found in the WoS are open-access, which means, it is possible to find high-quality free access publications.

Other platforms such as MEDLINE, SciELO, ResearchGate and Scholar Google are free and enable access to indexed scientific publications which passed through a peer-reviewed process to be published and therefore deserve credibility.

To be evaluated and be eligible for being a good reference, scientific publications should meet the criteria:

is the journal indexed by the main indexers?
Is the journal peer-reviewed?
Is the publication recent (maximum of 10 years of publication)?
Does the publication have a citation?
Who are the authors (university, country)?

These questions are more important than just the fact of being open access or not open access.

This pattern should be followed for the articles to be cited in the reviewing work. The selection of a good publication does also count on the experience of the scientist, who is familiarised with the research and writing of scientific work. Therefore, this revision work should incorporate high-quality scientific information, which will improve the characteristics of the article.

Our Review process

Our review process which we are constantly undertaking for every article on this site follows these principles.

We look to hire well-rounded scientists who are knowledgeable enough to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant citations based on the factors we have mentioned above.

This ensures that every piece of article you see on this site which is marked as “Reviewed” has gone through a thorough screening by a scientist or expert in the subject matter, reviewed for factual accuracy and cited in line with the high standards we set for citations.

Aside from articles marked as “Reviewed”, a large proportion of our articles are written by our reviewers.