Peer Review Policy
Submissions of articles to be considered for publication involves an evaluation by the Editorial Board of the Animal Welfare, Etológia és Tartástechnológia and reports from ad hoc reviewers as described below.
Manuscripts submitted as author or co-author by an editorial board member, or a reviewer of the journal may not be reviewed by that editor or reviewer.
We will not accept manuscripts that do not meet the requirements of an original scientific research paper (or review) or do not meet the scope and aims of the journal will not be accepted.
The author(s) of the manuscript and the referee(s) of the manuscript must not be from the same Department.
All papers published by the journal, regardless of type of manuscript, undergo two independent and anonymous peer reviews, who has been invited by the Editor.
The peer review process
The first stage of evaluation is done by the members of the Editorial Board. Each paper submitted to Animal Welfare, Etológia és Tartástechnológia is evaluated according to the following criteria: 1) meeting the formal requirements 2) the paper’s contribution to relevance and knowledge; 3) its potential to attract the interest of a professional audience and screened for plagiarism by the Turnitin software. Only manuscripts with a less than 20% similarity index are considered in the peer-review process. Manuscript with more than 20% similarity index, can be sent back to authors for corrections or changes needed to avoid possible plagiarism.
Papers meeting the requirements are sent for review. In the second stage, submitted manuscripts go through an anonymous proofreading process before publication (double-blind peer review). Articles are peer-reviewed by reviewers with academic degrees, who are ad hoc experts in the field of the manuscript.
The peer review criteria are as follows:
- Compliance of the manuscript with the formal, citation-style and length requirements set out in the author guidelines.
- Language correctness, clarity and freedom of expression.
- Clarity of tables, figures and other illustrations, appropriateness of content and form.
- Topicality, originality and relevance to the concept of the journal.
- Consistent use of scientifically and professionally accurate terminology.
- Structural proportionality of the paper, logical structuring of main and sub-chapters, structure of the paper, clarity.
- Validity of literature and theoretical background of the study, comparison of referred publications with the authors' own results.
- Applied appropriate methodology.
- Relevance and appropriateness of conclusions.
The reviewer of the article will evaluate the manuscript and recommend its publication or rejection. The editorial office will send the author the completed referee opinion.
The reviewers may propose the following options: 1) Paper accept without further revisions; 2) Paper accept with minor revisions; 3) Paper accept with major revisions; 4) Reject.
The final decision on whether the articles are accepted or rejected is made by the Editor based on the report made by the reviewers.
If the reviewed manuscript is not rejected but does not meet the requirements for publication in terms of content and/or form, the editor will review the revised manuscript and, if it meets the editor's requirements and the author's guidelines, will send the manuscript for editing and publish it in the journal. If necessary, a new round of review process will be initiated.
Before publication, the authors will receive a print-ready version of their paper for proofreading. At this time no further content changes in the text or appendices can be accepted.
