Scientific articles submitted to Journal of civil engineering and transport are reviewed in accordance with the following procedure:

Initial review

Editor-in-Chief and the Chairman of the Scientific Council will evaluate each article to determine if its topic and content are appropriate for consideration in transEngin. Works that do not meet the minimum criteria are returned to Authors. This is beneficial for Authors, who may decide to revise and submit the paper to another Journal, avoiding the delays of a lengthy review process that would nevertheless lead to rejection.

Equivalent review

Scientific papers that pass the initial review by the Editor-in-Chief and Chairman of the Scientific Council are forwarded to the Associate Editor. The Editor-in-Chief and the Chair of the Scientific Council selects Reviewers based on their knowledge in this specific field. Each article is reviewed by at least two Reviewers in the double-anonymous review process in which both Reviewers and Authors are anonymous. Reviewers are asked to rate the manuscript based on its originality, relevance, technical reliability and clarity. To facilitate timely publication, Reviewers are requested to complete the review form within 14 days. After collecting the Reviewers’ reports, the Associate Editor sends recommendations to the Authors. After receiving the corrected document, according to the Reviewers’ guidelines, the Associate Editor consults with the Editor-in-Chief, who issues a recommendation on the acceptability of the article.

Recommendation

Based on the comments of the Reviewers, the Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision on acceptance of the article and informs the Authors to the Associate Editor. The review is written in English on a form provided by the Associate Editor of the Journal. With the permission of the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, the review may be written in another language. The contract concluded with the Reviewer specifies the requirements for the reliability and detail of the review, the deadline for completion. The reviewer is not remunerated for performing the review. In the case of a negative review, an additional reviewer is appointed by the Editor-in-Chief and Chairman of the Scientific Council. The Section Editor ensures that the section is filled with scientific articles for each issue of the quarterly. The Editorial Board of the Journal may not accept a completed review if it does not meet the requirements. When the assessments of the Reviewers are extremely different, publication decisions are made by the Editor-in-Chief or the Chair of the Scientific Council. The author of the article is provided with the review text stripped of the Reviewer’s details. All Reviewers have the right to review the article again before submitting it for publication. The list of Reviewers is published in each issue of the journal transEngin and on the website. Each Reviewer will receive a certificate upon completion of the review.

Writing the Review

The purpose of the review is to provide the editors with expert opinions on the quality of the paper under consideration. A good review report should identify both the strengths and weaknesses of the paper and should also provide constructive and specific comments on how to improve the paper.

The following format is suggested for preparing the report:

• • Summary and Recommendation

     What is the purpose of the paper? Is the paper appropriate for publication in the Journal of civil engineering and transport? What are the main contributions of the paper? Are the contributions sufficiently significant? Are the methods or findings sufficiently novel? What are the major weaknesses of the paper? What is your recommendation for this paper and why? If the paper is unacceptable in its present form, does it show sufficient potential to ask the author(s) for resubmission?

  • Detailed Comments on Methodology and Conclusions

     Is the method of approach valid? Is the execution correct? Does the paper provide adequate acknowledgement of prior research? Do the data support the conclusions? If not, what other data are needed? Does the paper offer enough details so that the research could be reproduced? Should the authors be asked to provide supplementary methods or data online? It would be very helpful to provide page numbers to the parts of the paper to which the comments apply.

  • Detailed Comments on Readability

     Is the title appropriate? Is the abstract an accurate and useful summary of the paper? Is the paper clearly written? If not, how can it be improved? Can the paper be shortened? Are the tables and figures easy to understand? Does the paper contain typographical or grammatical errors? It will be helpful to provide page numbers to the parts of the paper to which the comments apply.

Criteria of publication

A document to be published in Journal of civil engineering and transport must meet the following criteria: originality, significance, technical solidity, lucidity. A review has a written form and ends with clear conclusion about allowing or rejecting article for publication. There are three potential types of recommendations of an article by the reviewers:

• • Acceptance of an article.
  • Corrections required.
  • Rejection of an article.

If the reviewer thinks that document can’t be published in the Journal of civil engineering and transport, a review should include short but sufficient justification in the remarks of a review that helps author (authors) to understand final decision. The Editor-in-Chief shall decide about the issue of the journal that article will be published in.

Confidentiality

The reviewers should treat content of reviewed document as strictly confidential and not to disclose it to others before publication. A reviewer should neither use nor disclose materials from a reviewed document. A reviewer must not disseminate copies of a reviewed article, unless it has already been published.

Conflict of interests

The reviewers are asked to inform Editor-in-Chief about any conflicts of interests while reviewing an article. Such conflicts of interest can occur if the reviewer is asked to referee a paper written by a colleague of the same organization, former or current student, former advisor, or closely-related person. Another type of conflict occurs, for example, when the reviewer is a direct competitor of the author of the paper for a grant. If the conflict is severe, the reviewer should recuse himself/herself.

Rejection of the article

An article may be rejected in the following cases:

• • The article is not consistent with transEngin’s scientific field.
  • Ghostwriting or guest authorship is detected.
  • Plagiarism is detected.
  • The review process ends with a clear rejection of the review.
  • All copyrights are infringed.
  • The article format does not meet basic editing requirements.
  • The number of submitted articles significantly exceeds the publication capacity.

In all cases, the decision to reject an article is made by the Editorial Board, and the author(s) receive a notification with the specific reasons for rejection and possible instructions for further action.