These guidelines provide general assessment standards for reviewers of the Journal of Digital Religion (JDR). Reviewers are expected to evaluate manuscripts fairly, constructively, confidentially, and in accordance with scholarly and publication ethics.
1. Purpose of Peer Review
Peer review at JDR is intended to help editors make informed publication decisions and to help authors improve the quality, clarity, originality, and scholarly contribution of their manuscripts. A good review identifies strengths, explains weaknesses, offers constructive suggestions, and evaluates whether the manuscript is suitable for publication in the journal.
Reviewers should focus on the manuscript’s scholarly merit, relevance to the journal, methodological soundness, ethical integrity, quality of argumentation, contribution to knowledge, and clarity of presentation.
2. Peer Review Model
JDR applies a double-blind peer review process. The identities of authors and reviewers should remain confidential throughout the review process. Reviewers must not attempt to identify the authors and must not disclose their own identity in comments intended for the authors.
The final editorial decision is made by the editor. Reviewer recommendations are advisory and must be supported by clear reasoning.
3. Before Accepting a Review Invitation
Before accepting a review invitation, reviewers should consider the following:
- Expertise: Accept the invitation only when the manuscript falls within your area of scholarly competence.
- Availability: Accept only when you can complete the review within the requested timeframe.
- Conflict of interest: Inform the editor immediately if there is any personal, professional, institutional, financial, or intellectual conflict that may affect impartial judgment.
- Confidentiality: Treat the manuscript and all related editorial communication as confidential materials.
- Objectivity: Evaluate the work on scholarly grounds and avoid bias based on nationality, religion, gender, seniority, institutional affiliation, or theoretical orientation.
4. General Assessment Criteria
Reviewers are encouraged to assess the manuscript using the following criteria. These criteria are general and may be adjusted according to the manuscript type, method, and disciplinary orientation.
Does the manuscript fit the aims and scope of JDR? Does it engage meaningfully with digital religion, religion and technology, media and religion, religious authority, ethics, or related interdisciplinary debates?
Does the manuscript offer a clear contribution to existing scholarship? Does it present a new argument, empirical finding, theoretical insight, methodological approach, or critical synthesis?
Does the manuscript engage relevant, current, and authoritative literature? Does it position its argument within existing debates and identify a clear research gap?
Are the key concepts clearly defined and consistently used? Is the theoretical framework appropriate to the research question and analysis?
Is the method clearly explained and suitable for the research question? Are data sources, sampling, fieldwork, textual analysis, digital ethnography, computational procedures, or other methods described with sufficient detail?
Are the claims supported by adequate evidence? Is the analysis rigorous, balanced, and logically connected to the findings? Are interpretations grounded in data or sources?
Does the manuscript address relevant ethical issues, especially when dealing with human participants, online communities, social media data, religious communities, sensitive beliefs, privacy, consent, or platform terms of service?
Is the manuscript well organized? Are the introduction, method, results, discussion, and conclusion coherent? Does the argument develop logically across the paper?
Is the manuscript readable and suitable for an international academic audience? Reviewers should focus on clarity of meaning rather than copyediting every grammatical issue.
Are citations accurate, relevant, balanced, and sufficient? Does the manuscript follow the journal’s referencing style? Are important works missing?
Where applicable, do figures, tables, screenshots, datasets, diagrams, or digital materials support the argument clearly and ethically?
If the manuscript discloses the use of generative AI or AI-assisted tools, is the disclosure clear, appropriate, and consistent with the journal’s author guidelines?
5. How to Structure the Review Report
Reviewers should provide a clear, constructive, and well-organized report. A useful review normally includes the following parts:
Summarize the manuscript’s topic, purpose, method, and main argument in a few sentences. This helps the editor understand how the reviewer reads the paper.
Identify the manuscript’s strongest features, such as originality, data, theoretical insight, methodological value, or relevance to the journal.
Explain substantial problems that affect the manuscript’s publishability, such as unclear contribution, weak method, unsupported claims, insufficient literature, ethical concerns, or structural problems.
List smaller revisions related to wording, formatting, citation style, missing details, unclear sentences, table/figure presentation, or consistency.
Provide a recommendation that is consistent with the comments given to the author. The recommendation should be justified by the substance of the review.
Use confidential comments only for information that should be seen by editors, such as ethical concerns, suspected plagiarism, possible conflicts of interest, duplicate publication, or sensitive editorial advice.
6. Recommendation Categories
Reviewers may be asked to select one of the following recommendations:
- Accept Submission: The manuscript is suitable for publication with no substantive revision.
- Minor Revisions Required: The manuscript is generally strong but requires limited revision before publication.
- Major Revisions Required: The manuscript has potential but requires substantial improvement in argument, method, analysis, literature, structure, or presentation.
- Resubmit for Review: The manuscript requires major restructuring or additional work and should be reviewed again after revision.
- Decline Submission: The manuscript has serious conceptual, methodological, ethical, evidentiary, or scope-related problems that make it unsuitable for publication in JDR.
Recommendations should be based on scholarly assessment and must be explained clearly. Reviewers should avoid giving a recommendation that contradicts the substance of their written comments.
7. Ethical Responsibilities of Reviewers
- Maintain the confidentiality of the manuscript and all peer-review communication.
- Do not share the manuscript with colleagues, students, assistants, or third parties without permission from the editor.
- Do not use unpublished ideas, arguments, data, images, or findings from the manuscript for personal advantage.
- Declare all actual or potential conflicts of interest.
- Provide fair, constructive, respectful, and evidence-based comments.
- Focus criticism on the manuscript, argument, method, evidence, and presentation.
- Avoid personal, hostile, discriminatory, defamatory, or dismissive language.
- Do not request citation of the reviewer’s own work unless there is a clear scholarly reason.
- Inform the editor confidentially if plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabricated data, unethical research practice, undisclosed AI use, or other integrity concerns are suspected.
8. Use of Generative AI in Peer Review
Reviewers must treat submitted manuscripts as confidential documents. Reviewers should not upload unpublished manuscripts, manuscript excerpts, figures, tables, data, reviewer comments, or editorial correspondence to public or third-party generative AI tools unless the journal explicitly permits such use and confidentiality is guaranteed.
Reviewers remain personally responsible for the content, accuracy, fairness, and integrity of their review reports. Review reports should reflect the reviewer’s own scholarly judgment.
9. Tone and Style of Review
Reviews should be written in a professional and collegial tone. Even when recommending rejection, reviewers should help authors understand the reasons for the recommendation and, where possible, indicate how the work could be improved for future submission elsewhere.
- specific rather than vague;
- evidence-based rather than impressionistic;
- respectful rather than dismissive;
- actionable rather than merely critical;
- consistent between comments to authors and confidential comments to editors.
10. Reviewer Checklist
- Does the manuscript fit the aims and scope of JDR?
- Is the research question clear and significant?
- Is the contribution original and identifiable?
- Is the theoretical framework appropriate?
- Is the method suitable and sufficiently explained?
- Are the claims supported by evidence?
- Is the engagement with literature adequate and current?
- Are ethical issues properly addressed?
- Are citations and references accurate and balanced?
- Is the writing clear enough for an international scholarly audience?
- Are the recommendation and comments consistent?
Reviewers serve as guardians of scholarly quality and integrity. A strong review helps editors make fair decisions and helps authors improve their work, regardless of the final recommendation.
