Peer review proces
The rules adopted by the journal Theological Forum for reviewing scientific articles are in accordance with the guidelines of the Ministry of Education and Science.
Each article is reviewed by at least two independent external reviewers.
The review policy takes into account the requirement of the so-called double-blind review process (author and reviewers do not know each other's identity).
In other cases, the reviewer shall sign a declaration of no conflict of interest, which may be expressed in the relationship between the reviewer and the author:
- direct personal relationships (kinship, legal relationships, conflict),
- relationships of professional dependence,
- direct scientific cooperation in the last two years preceding the preparation of the review.
The reviewer fills in a written review form approved by the editors or prepares a review according to his/her own scheme, whereby he/she must formulate a clear conclusion as to whether the article should be accepted for publication or rejected.
The reviewer is asked to indicate one of the six ratings and justify:
1) The article may be published without changes.
2) Can be published unchanged, but does not add anything special, hence the question of whether to allocate space for this particular text.
3) Acceptable in principle, but with amendments.
4) Not acceptable, requires major revision, which may or may not make the text acceptable.
5) Rejectable - no chance of real revision of the text.
6) The article could be published, but in another journal (please briefly justify).
Main criteria for admission of articles to the review procedure:
- the subject of the article must be in line with the profile of the journal,
- from the formal point of view, there must be a logical structure, scientific language, summaries and keywords, scientific apparatus,
- from the content point of view, the author must address a specific scientific problem in the article, and not only recapitulate textbook knowledge on a given topic,
- if it deals with already discussed problems, it should bring in new aspects and points of view.
In case one of the reviews is negative, a third reviewer is appointed; the final decision on the publication of the article is taken by the editorial team. Two negative reviews eliminate the article from further proceedings.