Details of Peer Review for Tropical Geography

    Peer review is the main step in appraising the academic quality and literature value of submitted manuscripts, and is also the most important step in the entire handling process. Tropical Geography adopts the international customary two-way anonymous review system to ensure objectivity and fairness in this step. The review rules and details are as follows.

I. Review rules

    1) At least 3 experts should be invited to review each manuscript;

    2) The reviewers and authors should not belong to the same institution and should not have a close association. For example, they should not have a teacher-student relationship or should not be students of the same teacher;

    3) Double-blind review (the names of reviewers and authors should remain undisclosed);

    4) Manuscripts on interdisciplinary subjects should be sent to experts of different majors for review;

    5) Authors can identify certain individuals and institutions to be avoided for the manuscript review.

II. Selection Rules for Review Experts

    1) The selection of experts will be made in consultation with this journal’s dynamic review expert database, references of the submitted manuscripts, and large-scale literature retrieval platforms;

    2) Review experts should be selected according to the subject terms or main keywords of the submitted manuscripts to ensure the consistency of research interests;

    3) The authentication of experts’ academic attainments is mainly based on the articles they have published in authoritative publications in China and other countries, as well as their academic influence;

    4) The experts’ credibility will be determined by their earnest attitude in reviewing manuscripts and on whether they can reply with their review comments within the review cycle period;

    5) We will seriously consider whether the experts have sufficient time and energy to review the manuscripts. For example, based on the academic ecology in China, experts with administrative positions in China are seldom invited to review manuscripts.

III. Screening Rules for Review Results

    1) The expert handling results comprise 4 categories: “agree to publish,” “publish after revision,” “review after major revision,” and “reject the manuscript;”

    2) For manuscripts with divergent review opinions, we encourage academic contention; the editorial department will attach importance to the objectivity and impartiality of review opinions to ensure that the evaluation on academic standards of reviewed manuscripts will not be affected by factors such as religion, political views, gender, region, etc.