Peer Review & for Reviewers | Pharmaceutical Sciences

June 2020, Vol 26, No. 2

Pharmaceutical Sciences is peer-reviewed, and quarterly journal providing a forum for basic to clinical issues related to all areas of pharmaceutical sciences. It is the official journal of Faculty of Pharmacy, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences.
- Platinum Open Access (no processing or publication fees)
- Fast and constructive peer review
- Indexed in ESCI (Web of Science) and Scopus
- Average time to first decision in 2019: 21 Days
- Acceptance rate in 2019: 16%

Peer Review Process:
All manuscripts submitted to Pharmaceutical Sciences are subject to rigorous review. This review consists of the following steps:
1. Initial submissions are reviewed by internal staff to ensure adherence to policies of TUOMS Press, including ethical requirements for human and animal experimentation.
2. Submissions are then assigned to an Editor for evaluation.
3. The Editor decides whether reviews from additional experts are needed to evaluate the manuscript. The majority of submissions are evaluated by two external reviewers, but it is up to the Editor to determine the number of reviews required.
4. After evaluation, the Editor chooses between the following decisions:
I. Accept
II. Minor Revision
III. Major Revision
IV. Reject
5. If the decision is Minor Revision or Major Revision, authors have 60 days to resubmit the revised manuscript. Authors may contact email address if they require an extension.
6. Upon resubmission, the Editor may choose to send the manuscript back to external reviewers, or may render a decision based on personal expertise.

Instruction for Reviewers:
The invitation letter will be sent including information about the title and abstract of the manuscript and the time limit expected for review. Following reviewer acceptance, the manuscript will be accessible to reviewer through his or her registration and then will be given access to download the entire manuscript. After reviewer, she/he may put her/his comments on website.
 Special comments on the manuscripts could be sent to editors if they are inappropriate to be declared to authors.
 A review in dedicated time will benefit the entire scientific community.
 Reviewers should decline refereeing the manuscripts is the financial interest of him or her, is a field that reviewer is now working on, or if the reviewer has contacted the author recently. This information is uttered in the “request for review” e-mail sent to reviewer; otherwise after receiving the manuscript, the reviewer should inform the editor in order to inhibit subjective reviewing.
 Information in manuscripts should be held confidential till the time of publication.
 In the case of accepting reviewing a manuscript, this is a request of the reviewers to re-review the future revisions of the manuscript. Of course, reviewing revisions will be handled by editorial board as it is possible in order to restrict extra burden on reviewers.
 Reviewers should assess the novelty and technical accuracy of the paper first draft and give specific comments and suggestions, including about layout and format, title, abstract, introduction, graphical abstracts and/or highlights, method, statistical errors, results, conclusion/discussion, language and references.
 If reviewer suspect plagiarism, fraud or have other ethical concerns, raise your suspicions with the editor, providing as much detail as possible.
 According to COPE guidelines, reviewers must treat any manuscripts they are asked to review as confidential documents. Since peer review is confidential, they must not share the review or information about the review with anyone without the agreement of the editors and authors involved. This applies both during and after the publication process.
 Any suggestion that the author includes citations to reviewers’ (or their associates’) work must be for genuine scientific reasons and not with the intention of increasing reviewers’ citation counts or enhancing the visibility of reviewers’ work (or that of their associates).