Peer Review Process

Double-blind peer review guideline

The KSV Journal of Pharmacy and Health Sciences employs a double-blind peer review process, where both the reviewers and authors remain anonymous to each other throughout the review. To maintain anonymity, KSV Journal of Pharmacy and Health Sciences ensures that all identifying information, including the authors' names, affiliations, acknowledgments, and conflicts of interest, are removed from the manuscripts before submission for review. This prevents any indirect or direct disclosure of the authors' identities to the reviewers.

Merits:

  • Ensuring author anonymity can eliminate any potential reviewer bias, such as prejudice based on the author's country of origin or past controversial works.
  • When evaluating articles, it is the content of the paper that is taken into consideration rather than the reputation of the author, even if they are prestigious or renowned.
  • Frequently, reviewers can recognize the writer based on their writing style, subject matter, or self-referencing.

Anonymised manuscript

KSV Journal of Pharmacy and Health Sciences removes any identifying information, such as authors' names or affiliations, from the manuscript before submission.

As well as removing names and affiliations under the title within the manuscript, other steps need to be taken to ensure the manuscript is correctly prepared for double-blind peer review. The key points to consider are:

  • Use the third person to refer to work the author has previously published.
  • Make sure that figures and tables do not contain any reference to author affiliations
  • Exclude acknowledgments and any references to funding sources.
  • Use the title page, which is not sent to reviewers, to detail these and to declare any potential conflicts of interest to the Editor.
  • Choose file names with care, and ensure that the file’s ‘Properties’ are also anonymized.
  • We take care to ensure that we do not inadvertently upload identifying information within any of the files that will be shared with reviewers. All file types except Title Page, Cover Letter, and Source Files are typically included in the version of our manuscript shared with reviewers.

Find the Peer review process chart below: