Guidelines for Reviewers

• Register in Publons

Publons is a website that provides a free service for academics to track, verify, and showcase their Peer-review and editorial contributions to journals. It is obvious, that each of your review activities at Publons will enhance your scientific values and recognition in the global community.
Therefore, the International Journal of Motor control and Learning (IJMCL) requests the referees perform the following steps in order to register their reviews in the Publons system:
1-    Registration in Publons: https://publons.com/about/home/
2-   After reviewing each article, add your own review to Publons: In this case, simply forward your reviewed email (Thanks Letter for reviewing) which is received from the IJMCL to reviewspublons.com

With Publons profile, one can endorse various journals. For this purpose, after logging into your personal page in the Publons system, you may endorse them.
For this purpose, by clicking on the ENDORSE THIS JOURNAL button, your name and photo will appear on the Publons page of the mentioned journal.

• Double-blind peer review policy:

IJMCL utilizes a double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewer and author are unknown from each other in the review process.  To facilitate this, authors should submit the files of “Title Page” containing the details of the authors, and “Manuscript” with no details of the authors as separate files.

 
Please ensure the following when reviewing for IJMCL: 

1. Comment to the editor:

• Your comments to the editor are private, and will not be shared with the authors.
• To discuss the seriousness of the main weaknesses and whether they're probably fixable, and to identify why the manuscript must or not be published, please use the private comments to the editor box.
• Your recommendations to reject and accept, or revise a manuscript must be primarily based on the main scientific strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript, not on the inconsistency with your own opinion, and not due to conflicts of interest.
• Do not copy & paste the same material into the editor's comments and author's comments boxes.

2. Comment to the author:

• Your opinion of authors will be read by both the authors and the editors.
• They must not disclose your private recommendation to reject, review or accept the manuscript.
• Authors and editors rely on you to highlight the most important issues e.g., your main reasons for the manuscript acceptance, rejection, or revision. 

• If you find any significant deficiencies, it is essential to consider whether they are fixable or not. For example, if they are related to study design, they may be serious and unfixable, but if they are related to inappropriate statistical analysis, they might be correctable if the authors are given to revise their manuscript.
• Your comments should be comprehensive and detailed to enhance the manuscript quality.
• If you cannot determine if the basic problems of the manuscript are correctable or not, you should give the authors a chance to do a major revision to fix them.
• Please make sure that the issues you identify as “major” actually are major weaknesses or problems. Fail to cite a paper, use a specific kind of analysis, or not to discuss certain limitations is not major deficiencies.
• For the rejection of a manuscript, “Null Results” aren't an acceptable reason. If a manuscript addresses an essential question, and if it's well properly designed, it can be informative even though the effects are null.