Reviewer Guideline

Peer Review Policy

International Journal of Digital Rehabilitation & Therapy (IJDRT) operates a two-stage process in the review of submitted manuscripts: The Internal editorial review and The External review process. Detailed information about the review process used in the journal is given below:

The Peer Review Process
1. The Editor-in-Chief’s review: Immediately after submission, the Editor-in-Chief pre-checks the manuscript to comply with the journal's purpose, scope and adhere to ethical research and writing standards. Afterward, the Editor-in-Chief directs the manuscripts that comply with the journal's publication policy to the Assistant Editor for Editorial (Internal) Review.

2. The Editorial (Internal) Review Process: At this stage, two internal reviewers take charge.
The Editor-in-Chief selects the first internal reviewer from the Assistant Editors. The assistant editor examines the manuscript for compliance with the journal writing rules and scans the article for plagiarism by Turnitin. Reviewer identity is visible to the author; author identity is visible to reviewer, reviewer and author identity is visible to (decision-making) editor.

Internal Reviewer 2
The Assistant Editor determines the one internal reviewer from the members of the Editorial Board according to their field of expertise. Internal reviewer evaluate the manuscript in terms of its subject, method, and results and decide whether it should be included in the external review process for detailed evaluation. Reviewer identity is not made visible to the author, author identity is not made visible to the reviewer, reviewer, and author identity is visible to (decision-making) editor.

A double-blind review process is our standard, i.e. neither the reviewer knows the name(s) of the author(s) nor the author(s) are informed who is going to review their article.

3. The Peer Review (External Review) Process: Two external reviewers take charge at this stage.
External Reviewers 1 & 2 (Identity Transparency: Double Anonymized)
The Section Editor selects two external reviewers from the scholars who have done research on the manuscript topic.
The Reviewer selected should not be related to the Author, come from the same research centre or be involved in the same research project as the Author. Authors will not be informed about editors’ decisions in this regard.
If the reviewer who has done research on the manuscript topic cannot be found, the reviewers are determined from among scholars who have a doctorate in that field of science. The reviewers evaluate the article in detail in terms of its subject, method, and results and express their opinions on whether the paper should be published or not. If both reviewers' reports are positive, the study is accepted for publication with the decision of the Editor-in-Chief. If one of the two reviewers has a negative opinion, the study is sent to a third reviewer. Manuscripts can be published with the favorable decision of at least two reviewers. Reviewer identity is not made visible to the author; author identity is not made visible to the reviewer; reviewer and au-thor identity are visible to (decision-making) editor.
Names of all reviewers, without revealing who has reviewed which article, are published alphabetically once a year in the fourth, final issue of the number for the given year.

The evaluation process should not take longer than 70 day on average, but the editors cannot guarantee an editorial decision within any established deadline. Authors can check the status of their manuscript (awaiting reviewer selection, awaiting reviewer scores, etc.) online in their Author’s centre. Additionally, Authors are notified by e-mail about every decision made by the Editorial Office regarding their manuscript.