General Philosophy
The objective of peer review is to enhance the quality and the content of the manuscript under reviewing process. Conscientious peer review is a time-consuming process, but it is critical and significant step to ensure the quality of scientific journals and their published work. The Malaysian Journal of Pharmacy and the Malaysian Pharmacist Society are very grateful for the time and effort spent by you on creating contributing efforts to our success, thus, this journal supports reviewers to claim their reviewing efforts using Publons®.
The Malaysian Journal of Pharmacy policy adheres to the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (http://publicationethics.org). Our work ensures that the peer reviewing process is honest, impartial, and timely. The decision to accept or reject any manuscript for publication is purely based on at least TWO reviewers’ recommendations according to the significance, originality and clarity of the manuscript and its relevance to the journal.
Our procedures of identifying and classifying potential reviewers relies on a broad variety of outlets including editorial boards, personal information, suggestions from authors and bibliographic databases. The Malaysian Journal of Pharmacy is conducting a double anonymized review process in which the identities of the authors are concealed from the reviewers and the identities of the reviewers are hidden from the authors.
The process
Received submission will initially be assessed by editor in chief and assign to editor in respective expertise. The editor will determine suitability for publication in this journal. If a submission is deemed suitable, it will typically be sent to a minimum of two reviewers for an independent expert assessment of the scientific quality. The decision of accepted or rejected will be taken by our editors with recommendation of reviewers. If contradicting comment is noted, a third reviewers’ opinion will be obtained. Authors can appeal the editorial decision for their corresponding manuscript by submitting a formal appeal request to the official email address to Editor in chief. Only one appeal per submission will be considered and the appeal decision will be final.
Our editors are not involved in making decisions about papers which:
- they are part of the authorship
- have been written by family members or colleagues.
- relate to products or services in which they have an interest.
Any such submissions will be subject to the journal’s usual procedures and peer review will be handled independently of the editor involved and their research group. Read more about Duties of Editors.
Special issues and article collections
The peer review process for special issues and article collections follows the same process as outlined above for regular submissions, except, a guest editor will send the submissions out to the reviewers and recommend a decision to the journal editor. The journal editor oversees the peer review process of all special issues and article collections to ensure the high standards of publishing ethics and responsiveness are respected and is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles.
Duties of the reviewer could be found in Publication Ethics.
The reviewing process for the Malaysian journal of Pharmacy should be within the following follow:
- Start by describing the significant contributions made by the paper. What are its key strengths and drawbacks, and its publicity suitability? Please provide both general and detailed comments on these issues and stress your most important points.
- Comments should be positive and intended to improve the text of the manuscript. You should consider yourself the mentor of the authors. Please make your comments as complete and informative as possible.
- Express your views positive or negative clearly with supporting arguments and references as required. It should include clear comments on the work’s aim, opinions’ strengths, shortcomings, research or publication misconduct, and significance of the manuscript, its originality and its value in the field.
- Specific remarks referring to line numbers are most helpful and encouraged while reviewing to ensure the manuscript follow, and interesting ideas without repetition
- If you feel unqualified to deal with certain aspects of the manuscript, please provide a comment to identify these areas.
- Comments should be submitted to maljpharm@gmail.com through the reviewer link in a word file, with the proper previous flow, you name, title, affiliation and date within two weeks from the date you received the manuscript. To protect your privacy, the Editorial Assistant Journal will delete your details from the assets of these papers.
Important questions to contemplate while reviewing:
- Is there any indication that the images (western blot, cell culture, …etc) have been fabricated or inappropriately manipulated? If so, please illustrate in brief with reference(s).
- Is the submitted manuscript within the scope of the Journal? Is the topic and information of significant interest to the scientific community of the Journal?
- Dose the manuscript structure accurately meet the journal’s templet including the title, abstract, key words, introduction, and conclusions?
- Are the employed methods and procedures appropriate, cutting-edge, and described clearly enough to reproduce the work by someone else?
- Are the ethical issues properly addressed? This includes cases of some cell culture studies relaying on the production of the studied cells from humans, preclinical studies including using animal tissue on the in vitro scale, and clinical work?
- Are appropriate statistical analyses and employed software details used sufficiently?
- Are the used tables or figures supporting the ideas, or repeating itself?
- Are the conclusions and discussion enough and clarifying the presented data?
- Are the cited references correct, appropriate and up to date to support the manuscript?
- Are citations provided when they are necessary? Are any key citations missing?
- Should any portions of the paper be expanded, condensed, combined, or deleted? Does the manuscript comply with the Instructions for Authors?
- Is this work reporting data for first time, or data with a significant degree of novelty, or not? If any, please provide details and suggestions.
- Is the work plagiarised from another published publication? If so, please illustrate in brief with reference(s).
- Is there any indication that the data have been fabricated or inappropriately manipulated? If so, please illustrate in brief with reference(s).