Editorial Policies & Ethics

      1. Authorship & Funding

Authorship. All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the manuscript should be listed as authors, whether they have worked in its conception or design, data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation, drafting or revising the work, or in all these areas, and provided that they have approved of the final version to be published in our journal.

Author attribution. Authors are encouraged to provide an Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCiD) number. This is aimed at offering transparency and disambiguating their identity from that of other researchers. Providing an ORCID identifier is mandatory for principal and corresponding authors.

Multiple authorship. In multiple-authored works, the journal understands that the author list provided during the submission process is ranked in descending order of relative contribution to the content of those involved. The journal's OJS metadata framework provides the option to indicate whether there is more than one principal, first author and the roles that each author was responsible for; if requested, this information will be indicated in a footnote in the final, published version of the work.

Other contributors. All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an 'Acknowledgements' section, e.g. a person who provided purely technical help, or anyone having read the manuscript and suggested improvements. Any acknowledgements should appear at the end of the article, prior to the list of references.

Funding. ES Review requires all authors to acknowledge the financial support received for their research. This must be done, not in their submitted manuscript, but as part of the OJS metadata during the online Submission process. If approved for publication, the information will be included in the final, published version under a separate heading entitled ‘Funding,’ placed prior to ‘References.’

      2. Peer Review process

In ES Review, all submissions are subjected to an evaluation process of their technical quality and scientific standard, which may take four-eight months. It is comprised of the following stages:

1. Internal review. Once a submission is received, it is reviewed by the editors to ensure that it falls within the journal scope and meets the journal’s basic requirements and anti-plagiarism policies. A first editorial decision is taken to either desk reject the manuscript or send it to review. This general evaluation may take between two to four weeks.

Desk rejection. If the initial assessment concludes that the submission does not meet the minimum requirements of scientific and editorial quality (Submissions/2), it will be desk rejected and not sent out for external review. Authors will be notified of the decision and informed of the reasons on which it was based.

2. External peer review. If the submission meets the required quality, content, and stylistic standards, it is then sent out for a double-blind, peer review by at least two external evaluators, experts in the field concerned. For the journal's commitment to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other, see 'Ensuring a blind review' below.

The process, may take between four and six months, depending on whether a third reviewer is required (when the first two review results are discrepant) or one or more rounds of review are needed (in view of the depth of the changes necessary).

Referees protocol. Referees will be invited by email to assess a submission. The email will include an abstract of the article or title of the review sent to ES Review. If they accept, they will be asked to register and log in the journal’s official site to be able to access the journal's guidelines for reviewers, manuscript files and online assessment form. Evaluations will be due within six weeks.

Assessment criteria. Referees are asked to write their comments and recommendations, and rate the submission, using a scale from 1 (weak) to 5 (strong), according to these criteria:

1. Suitability of the paper in relation to the range of topics of interest for this journal.
2. Interest concerning subject matter, method, conclusions.
3. Knowledge of previous scholarship with reference to the topic under discussion.
4. Degree of originality and relevance concerning current research in the field.
5. Scientific rigour and depth of analysis.
6. Organisation of contents.
7. Accuracy in the use of concepts, methods, and terms.
8. Style and correct use of language.
9. Use of updated bibliography.
10. Relevance of the theoretical implications of the study for future research.

Assessment form and reports. ES Review asks that reviewers use the corresponding box to issue a report assessing the technical quality and scientific standard of the article, irrespective of the fact that their final recommendation may be positive (Accept, Revisions required) or negative (Resubmit for review, Decline). In the case of a positive recommendation, the journal would also appreciate that feedback offers insight on improvement areas that may enhance the article's impact if published. Reviewers may upload the author's manuscript file with their comments or their own file, but this is not a requirement.

ES Review reserves the right to edit the reviewers' assessment reports, if it is believed that their content may be found offensive to the authors or may inadvertently disclose confidential information.

Collaboration acknowledgement. ES Review will provide reviewers with a certificate of collaboration to credit their work. Unless they express their wish to the contrary, their names will be listed in a table of acknowledgements in the online list of reviewers that is published every two years.

3. Final decision. Within the month following the reception of all reports, the editors assess the submissions in light of the readers' comments and recommendations in order to make a final decision. It will be one of four:

• Accepted, when the work does not present any obstacle to publication;
• Revisions required, if minor corrections are required, feasible within an estimated period of 2 to 4 months;
• Resubmit for review, when the interest of the proposal is evident, but the revisions required for publication are significant and considered to be only feasible within a period not shorter than 4 to 6 months;
• Declined, when it presents serious problems of conceptualisation, method, and/or development that discourage its publication.

Notification. The authors are notified of the reasoned decision and provided with a copy of the external referees’ comments.

      3. Publication ethics

The journal adheres to the Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid Good Practice Guidelines and the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers. These commit all parties involved in the publication of issues (editors, authors, reviewers) and may be summarised as follows:

• Originality. The authors will guarantee that their contributions are original works that have not been previously published elsewhere. They will not submit their contributions to any other publication while they are under consideration by ES Review.

• Ensuring a blind review. Every effort will be made to ensure the blind review process in order to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves removing all text references to authors and all file properties of authors and reviewers.

• Competing interests and confidentiality. The referees of ES Review are required to declare that they have no personal, academic, research, or financial conflicts regarding the reviewed article, and that they will maintain the confidentiality of both the article and the assessment.

• Plagiarism. The journal will ensure compliance with good research practices. To preserve the copyrights of authors and publishers from violation, the journal uses Turnitin as a plagiarism detection tool. The service is provided by the Servicio de las Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (STIC) of the University of Valladolid.

• Self-plagiarism. ES Review follows the COPE recommendations on self-plagiarism. If an author submits a manuscript similar to work already published or in the public domain, e.g. a chapter from a PhD dissertation, this must be disclosed in the time of submission, as there may be a question of breach of copyright. When the publication of the work is redundant, showing direct replication of whole sentences or paragraphs at an unacceptably high proportion, the paper will be rejected.

      4. Research ethics

• Participant consent, confidentiality, and anonymity. Articles involving human research participants must protect their privacy while collecting, analysing, and reporting data. Manuscripts must include a statement affirming that informed consent was obtained from all participants; they must also describe the procedures used to ensure their confidentiality and anonymity.

• Sex and gender, race, and minority groups. ES Review is committed to advancing research and learning in an inclusive, diverse, and equal environment present at every stage in the editorial process. The journal values engagement with difficult topics, but will reject contributions showing discriminatory animus toward gender, race, religious, or minority groups. It encourages authors to include sex and gender considerations where relevant and to make use of inclusive language.

      5. Retraction

In the case that any work published in ES Review is found to have violated any of the ethics policies above at any stage of the editorial process, the editors will consider its retraction or removal. To minimise harm, the notice of retraction or removal will be published as soon as possible.