Review policy

In the first step, the manuscripts that are received are evaluated by the editorial board, which includes a basic check of the relevant topic within the scientific fields covered by the journal, scientific relevance and originality. The editorial board may reject a contribution before the review process if it considers that the contribution is outside the journal's area of interest, if it is of poor quality and does not meet the technical rules for formatting papers and reference rules, and if it finds that the author does not adhere to ethical standards.

An editor may exclude members of the editorial board from the editorial process if they are in a conflict of interest (collaboration or other form of association with the authors, authorship or participation in the review process).

In case of suspicion of unethical conduct (plagiarism, self-plagiarism, redundancy, data manipulation, change of authorship, etc.) the editorial board will act in accordance with the recommendations of the International Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which are also available at the official Web page of the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia.

Complaints against editorial decisions are addressed directly to the editorial board, which acts in accordance with the recommendations.

Generally editors do not publish their own scientific papers. Exceptionally, based on the conducted assessment of the scientific contribution, this may be allowed with the provision of an independent double-blind review.

All scientific papers undergo double blind review process. Two reviewers are proposed by the members of the editorial board, taking into account their competencies with regard to research areas and the application of specific methods. The guidelines for reviewers list the categories of papers as well as the criteria of critical and constructive evaluation, detailed explanation of comments and suggestions.

Reviewers are required to notify the editorial board if they feel they are not sufficiently qualified with respect to the topic of the paper and if they are in a potential conflict of interest regarding the contribution they are reviewing.

The editorial board analyses the reviews, and in case of different grades, the editorial board makes the final judgment or forwards the paper to the third review. Reasons for rejecting a contribution that have undergone a review process may arise solely from scientific shortcomings (originality, clarity, relevance).