Peer review process

On receipt of manuscripts by JBRCP, the article will be immediately passed to the Section Editor who will read and subject it to plagiarism check. Once the article is considered potentially fit for publication, the editor will send it to two or more reviewers who are experts in that field. After this stage, an article with statistical analysis will be examined by a statistician. The article will then be subjected to editorial revision by the JBRCP. Those considered for publication, but requiring some corrections will be sent to the author for further revision. Rejected articles will be communicated to authors with reasons.

• Authors will be notified of the review progress within 28 days. Peer–review recommendations will be communicated to the author(s) at six weeks. Where this is not possible, a notice will be issued and the reasons for delay will be provided. For a research work considered by the reviewers to be fit for publication but with a sub-standard manuscript, major or minor revisions may be requested. Authors may then be required to consider, accept or reject recommendations, elucidate on a particular aspect of the research or consider the option to completely rewrite the manuscript. Authors should note that although the journal is not inclined to reject the publication of a well conceptualized and conducted high quality research simply on the basis of a poorly written report, the journal places a high premium on the comments provided by the peer-reviewers when making final editorial decisions.

It is also the journal’s peer review policy that NO manuscript should be rejected only on the basis of ‘lack of Novelty’, provided the manuscript is scientifically robust and technically sound.