The procedure for peer review of the articles, adopted in the publication, approximates the current publishing principles of the world's leading publishers, as well as the recommendations of the Committee on the Ethics of Scientific Publications (COPE).
The purpose of peer review is to check whether the articles submitted for publication fit the editorial requirements for publications and improve their quality through the evaluation of highly qualified peer reviews.
The editorial team carries out a double-blind peer review of articles submitted for publication. According to the above mentioned procedure, reviewers and authors do not know each other and act anonymously, providing as much as possible for an objective evaluation of the submitted manuscripts and avoiding conflicts of interests.
The stages of review process are the following:
1) choosing the candidates of reviewers, regarding two important points – their field of competence and absence of conflict of interests between reviewers and author(s);
2) preparing the reviews according to the review`s requirements of the editorial during the term, appropriate for this (in general, not later, than one month);
3) at this stage one of the following decisions are possible to be made:
- accept the article;
- revise with the improvement of the article according to the reviewer's recommendations (in this case the 2 and 3 stages repeat only with the final decision-making by a reviewer), or
- reject the article;
4) publication of the article after acceptance by two reviewers, final minor author`s corrections, signing the authors’ rights transfer agreement and the decision of the editorial team.
The structure of the review should consist of the following parts:
1) assessment whether the reviewed article concerns the specific area (scope), aim and goals of the Bulletin;
2) decision whether it is in line with the requirements for authors and ethical conditions of the Bulletin;
3) consideration whether the title and the content of the article suit each other and whether the arguments of the author are strict and prove their statements and conclusions;
4) analysis of the references whether they are the most relevant and important concerning the specific topic of the article;
5) whether it is a new and relevant research, interesting for the audience of the Bulletin and the international scholar community.
Among the main reasons for rejecting the manuscript are the following:
1)the requirements regarding the size of the manuscript or its structure or appropriate methods of research are not completed;
2)the old methodology and sources were used and new knowledge and valuable results failed to be presented;
3)inaccurate conclusions, assumptions or absence of any conclusions;
4)lack of up-to-date references or self-citations;
5) poor language quality, as well as mistakes and lack of scholar style and scholar writing logic, which lead to unclear meaning of the content and/or its misunderstanding.