What is peer review?

Peer review is designed to assess the validity, quality and often the originality of articles for publication. Its ultimate purpose is to maintain the integrity of science by filtering out invalid or poor quality articles. It is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field.

Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish; and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries.

Professional peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. Scholarly peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal or as a book.

Referees' evaluations usually include an explicit recommendation of what to do with the manuscript or proposal, often chosen from options provided by the journal. Most recommendations are along the lines of the following:

• to unconditionally accept the manuscript or proposal,
• to accept it in the event that its authors improve it in certain ways,
• to reject it, but encourage revision and invite resubmission,
• to reject it outright.

IJATCA follows a strict blind peer-review programme, wherein the reviewers are not aware of the identities of the authors of the papers which are being reviewed by them. This policy is a recent amendment to the existing set of guidelines so as to prevent any sort of favouritism. The IJATCA reviewers are selected after thorough screening process. IJATCA has a process of inviting applications from prospective reviewers. However, the publisher also individually contacts and invites competent individuals to join the esteemed board of IJATCA reviewers.

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