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.

 

Who are our Reviewers?

Our reviewers are Clinical psychologists, mental health counsellors, authors and psychiatrists.

Our reviewers are all trained to a PhD level and have submitted research work which has been cited thousands of times.

 

Dhammi and Haq, 2016. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4800951/

Natarajan, 2016. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4966368/

Landhuis, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1038/nj7612-457a

Garfield, 1970. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/V1p133y1962-73.pdf

O’Kelly et al. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpurol.2018.08.019

Li et al., 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2622-5

Birkle et al., 2020. ://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00018

 

Dr Bruno de Brito silva PhD

Psychology Scientist

Dr Bruno is a PhD in Psychology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and also a Master’s in Social Psychology (Federal University of Sergipe- UFS) with expertise and research interests in Mental Health care, Parenting and Conjugality, Gender and Human Sexuality, Risk and Protective Factors of the LGBTQ+ population and LGBTQ+…

Dr Pablo Christian González Caino PhD

Psychologist

Dr Pablo Christian González Caino is a psychologist with expertise in aversive behaviors, technology, gaming and AI. He writes and reviews content on these topics   Dr González Caino Highlights:   Research and professor at Universidad Argentina de la Empresa, Argentina with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology Winner of CONICET scholarships for doctoral and postdoctoral…

Dr. Mark Mohan Kaggwa

Dr. Mark Mohan Kaggwa is a psychiatrist with experience in both clinical and research work. Major research contributions have been in forensic psychiatry, suicidology, medical education, and addiction psychiatry.  He writes and reviews articles on these topics.   Brief bio I have a wealth of expertise and experience in research and publication in psychiatry. I…

Ivan Kahwa

Mr Ivan Kahwa is a chemist and phytopharmaceutical scientist with expertise in chemistry, pharmacology, phytochemistry, and Nanobiotechnology. He writes and reviews content on these topics. Mr Ivan Kahwa’s Highlights: Guest Researcher at the University of Leipzig, Senior Research Fellow/Scientist, and Lecturer at the  Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, Mbarara University of Science and Technology.…