Reviewer Responsibilities & Conflict of Interest Policy
1. Reviewer Responsibilities Policy
Reviewers invited by TUJNAS must provide objective, constructive, and confidential assessments of manuscripts. Reviewers should comment on the originality, methodology, data presentation, interpretation, references, ethical compliance, and clarity of the work. Personal criticism of authors is not acceptable.
Reviewers must declare any conflict of interest and decline the invitation if they cannot provide an impartial review. Reviewers must not share, copy, cite, or use any part of the manuscript before publication. Any suspicion of plagiarism, duplicate submission, data fabrication, image manipulation, ethical violation, or other misconduct should be reported confidentially to the editor.
2. Reviewer Conflict of Interest Policy
TUJNAS is committed to maintaining the integrity, independence, confidentiality, and fairness of its peer-review process. Reviewers are expected to provide objective, constructive, timely, and confidential evaluations of manuscripts assigned to them.
A reviewer conflict of interest exists when a reviewer’s personal, professional, institutional, academic, financial, commercial, political, or other relationships or activities could influence, or reasonably appear to influence, the reviewer’s judgment of a submitted manuscript.
2.1 Reviewer Responsibility to Disclose Conflicts
Reviewers must disclose any actual, potential, or perceived conflict of interest before accepting a review invitation. If a conflict becomes known after the reviewer has accepted the invitation or submitted the review, the reviewer must immediately inform the handling editor or editorial office.
Reviewers must not accept a review assignment if they are unable to provide an independent and impartial evaluation.
2.2 Conflicts That Require Disclosure or Recusal
Reviewers must decline the review invitation or consult the handling editor before accepting the assignment if any of the following circumstances apply:
- The reviewer has a current or recent collaboration, publication, research project, grant, consultancy, or professional partnership with any of the authors.
- The reviewer works at the same institution, department, laboratory, research group, center, organization, or company as any of the authors.
- The reviewer has a current or recent supervisory, student, mentoring, family, personal, or close professional relationship with any of the authors.
- The reviewer has a financial, commercial, patent, licensing, consultancy, advisory, employment, sponsorship, or ownership interest related to the manuscript or its findings.
- The reviewer has direct academic competition, personal disagreement, or rivalry with any of the authors.
- The reviewer has previously reviewed, edited, advised on, translated, contributed to, or otherwise helped prepare the manuscript before its submission to TUJNAS.
- The reviewer has strong personal, political, religious, ideological, or intellectual beliefs that may prevent a fair and balanced evaluation of the manuscript.
- The reviewer has any other relationship or circumstance that could affect, or appear to affect, the objectivity of the review.
When in doubt, reviewers should disclose the possible conflict to the handling editor and wait for the editor’s decision before proceeding.
2.3 Confidentiality and Use of Manuscript Information
All manuscripts under review are confidential documents. Reviewers must not share, copy, distribute, discuss, upload, or disclose any part of the manuscript, supplementary files, reviewer reports, editorial correspondence, data, figures, tables, or research findings with any person without prior written permission from the handling editor.
Reviewers must not use unpublished information, data, methods, interpretations, ideas, or findings obtained through peer review for personal, academic, professional, financial, commercial, competitive, or institutional advantage.
Reviewers must not contact the authors directly about the manuscript during or after the review process unless expressly authorized by the journal.
2.4 Use of Assistants, Students, or Colleagues
Reviewers must not involve students, assistants, colleagues, or other individuals in the review process without prior approval from the handling editor. If permission is granted, the names and contributions of all individuals who assisted with the review must be disclosed to the journal, and those individuals must follow the same confidentiality and conflict-of-interest requirements as the invited reviewer.
2.5 Use of Artificial Intelligence or Automated Tools
Reviewers must not upload manuscripts, reviewer reports, unpublished data, figures, tables, supplementary files, or editorial correspondence to artificial intelligence tools, translation systems, automated summarization tools, or other external platforms that may store, process, or reuse confidential content.
Limited use of language-editing tools may be acceptable only when confidentiality is fully protected and no manuscript content is disclosed to external systems. Reviewers remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, confidentiality, and integrity of their review.
2.6 Citation and Self-Citation Ethics
Reviewers must not use the peer-review process to request unnecessary citations to their own work, the work of colleagues, the work of their institution, or the work of journals with which they are affiliated.
Citation recommendations must be academically justified, directly relevant to the manuscript, and intended to improve the scholarly quality of the article.
2.7 Editorial Handling of Reviewer Conflicts
When a reviewer discloses a conflict of interest, the handling editor will assess whether the reviewer can provide an independent and objective evaluation. Depending on the nature and severity of the conflict, the editor may:
- Allow the reviewer to proceed after recording the disclosed conflict;
- Ask the reviewer to decline the assignment;
- Cancel the review assignment;
- Disregard a submitted review;
- Seek an additional independent review; or
- Take other appropriate editorial action to protect the integrity of the peer-review process.
Serious or undisclosed conflicts may result in the removal of the reviewer from the journal’s reviewer database.
2.8 Failure to Disclose a Conflict
Failure to disclose a relevant conflict of interest may compromise the integrity of the peer-review process. If TUJNAS discovers that a reviewer failed to disclose a conflict, the journal may reassess the review, seek additional independent review, revise the editorial decision process, remove the reviewer from future assignments, or take further action in accordance with the journal’s publication ethics policies.
2.9 Relationship to Other Journal Policies
This policy should be read together with the journal’s Peer-Review Process, Declaration of Competing Interests, Editorial Conflict of Interest and Recusal Policy, Publication Ethics Policy, and Confidentiality Policy.
Reviewers who are uncertain whether a situation represents a conflict of interest should disclose the matter to the handling editor before accepting or continuing the review.
