Evaluation Policies

All texts submitted to Papeles de Identidad go through an internal and external evaluation process. In the section "Research articles", which includes original research articles, a strict evaluation process through a double-blind procedure is followed. Being faithful to this strict evaluation process, Papeles de Identidad encourages its evaluators to read the articles carefully, respectfully, and with arguments, going beyond formalism and making this activity a weighty academic act, which enriches the debate and does not censor or limit it.

Peer review process

  1. Papeles de Identidad follows a "double-blind" peer review method.
  2. Once a text has been received by Papeles de Identidad, the editor in charge and the editorial team will assess whether it meets the formal and thematic criteria of the journal and its research group.
  3. If these requirements are met, in a first phase a general review of the quality and thematic adequacy of the text will be carried out. This first evaluation will be carried out by the editorial committee of the journal and will last approximately three weeks from the reception of the text. If it is considered that the text does not meet the required criteria, a justified response will be sent to the author.
  4. The articles that pass this first phase will be sent to two evaluators who are specialists in the subject or line of research that the work deals with. Both will evaluate the text within a maximum period of eight weeks after the first acceptance following criteria of excellence and rigor in the academic forms and thematic adjustment to the editorial line of Papeles de Identidad, reviewing and assessing with special care the issues mentioned in "indications for evaluators".
  5. Once the evaluations have been received, a member of the editorial committee will act as rapporteur for each article and will issue a brief report recommending one of the following decisions, which will be communicated to the author: (1) Not publishable; (2) Publishable without modifications or with slight modifications; (3) Publishable with modifications.
  6. In the latter two cases, the author must include the suggested changes and justify why some suggestions are not accepted. When sending a new version, a document must be included explaining the changes introduced and discussing, if necessary, the suggestions or criticisms made by the reviewers and by the editorial board on behalf of the editorial committee. A period of approximately four weeks is granted to make the changes.

Annually, Papeles de Identidad publishes a list of all persons who have completed anonymous evaluations.

 

Guidelines for reviewers

Once a text has been received, the editorial team will send, through OJS, an e-mail to the reviewers considered most appropriate with indications on the journal's editorial policy and identifying data of the work to be reviewed (title and abstract of the assigned article). The e-mail includes an invitation to register on the journal's website to complete the review and a URL address that leads directly to the page for review of the submission. Each reviewer must log-in to accept or decline the assignment, and, if applicable, download the submission and comment on the paper and propose their recommendation.

Deadline for review

The default deadline is 8 weeks.

Important note for reviewers

The editorial team can contact reviewers directly, and vice versa, although communications will preferably be made through OJS messages. The application's messaging system will automatically send two reminders: one if the reviewer does not respond to a review request within 7 days; another when the review deadline has passed.

Anonymous review

To ensure the integrity of a blind review in the journal sections where this applies all persons involved in the process (authors, editors and reviewers) should check that their names have been removed from the text.

User's Guide Reviewer

The steps to carry out the evaluation process in the platform can be consulted in the OJS manual for article reviews. The following serves as a quick guide:

  1. Enter the platform with the link sent in the invitation email and enter username and password.
  2. Choose the text in “My list”. In the Review screen, the main information of the article will be displayed (title, abstract, link to the files to be reviewed and deadlines; the dates of sending the request, the date of the acceptance or rejection response and the date of sending the recommendation are shown).
  3. If the review is accepted, download the file of the text to be evaluated and perform the review in the form provided for this purpose within OJS. During the review process, the reviewer can edit the text (in .doc or .docx format), introducing changes while keeping the review system active and/or with the “insert comments” function. If you do so, you must add the edited file at the end of the evaluation process (“Upload file” in the Upload/Reviewer's files section). In any case, the main part of the process is the reasoned opinion (see next step).
  4. Once the process is completed, select a recommendation and send the review by clicking on “Submit”. The form must be completed before selecting a recommendation.

General criteria for evaluation

The texts that Papeles de identidad sends for external review have undergone a previous selection, which is carried out either by members of the editorial team or, in the case of special issues or monographic issues, by guest editors. The texts that reach this stage have, therefore, a minimum guarantee of quality.

For Papeles de Identidad the evaluation work is not, and does not want to be in any case, neither the production of a sentence, nor the request of a qualification, nor the assignment of positive adjectives, much less a measure of the adjustment of the evaluated work to a canon. If we had to qualify it in any way, we would say that ideally we would want the evaluation process to enable a dialogue between the evaluators —always doctors, always professionals or qualified academics— and the authors, which really integrates the process of producing the text and works to improve it. This is what we invite the reviewers to do. We want these texts to be published, even if that means a longer and more discussed editing process. Neither complying with the mere formality of the “opinion” nor acting as an article factory are things that really interest us.

Therefore, we ask the people we invite to evaluate to take into account the above and, if they accept our invitation, to take the work with care, considering the uniqueness of each section. As general criteria, we asked the evaluators to pay attention to (1) the originality of the proposal and its capacity to intervene in a relevant way in the field of knowledge and/or discipline with which it discusses, (2) the relation with the purposes of the journal, (3) the quality of the argument and its adequacy with the objective of the text.