Guidelines for reviewers

If you are interested to review for J-ISPIN, please register on the ScholarOne submission system. Please be careful when selecting your Keywords in the users profile as those can be used by an Editor to select you as a possible reviewer. Please choose "Reviewer" for the "Reviewer Role" option.

J-ISPIN will publish the names of reviewers who have served in each calendar year by submitting one or more reviews.

When you receive a review request, please first check to make sure you have no conflict of interest. If you do have a conflict of interest, please inform the requesting Editor and decline the review. For example, decline the review if the paper is from your institute, from an author with whom you work or have worked before (former or current student, supervisor, collaborator, etc.) or an author with whom you have co-published before.

When you review a paper, you can submit two sets of comments:

1. Remarks for the Author (mandatory, visible to authors). This section is mandatory. Please write here your review and evaluation about the paper. Please also remember two very important notes:

• Never disclose your identity to the authors! Remember that authors can read this section, so don't leave any clues about who you are. Reviews must be anonymous.
• Do not ask authors to cite/compare with your own paper! Not only this might reveal your identity (see above), but it might also give the perception that you want to increase your citation count. It is also implicitly not allowed by IEEE, as per IEEE PSPB Manual section 8.2.2.A.4.

Remarks for the Editor (optional, invisible to authors). This section is optional. Please use this to report exceptional situations, such as plagiarism, double submission, conflict of interest, private comments to the editor, etc. Authors will not be able to see these comments.

• Reviews must be submitted in English.
• Two main criteria are necessary for a recommendation of acceptance for publication: novelty (new science or a new approach to established science; this does not apply to review papers, where the emphasis is on timeliness and balance) and appropriateness (the manuscript is complete in and of itself and is a good fit for J-ISPIN.
• Please comment on both the presentation and the technical aspects of the work, including novelty, technical soundness, practicality (if applicable), experiments, comparison to related works, etc.
• Please pay extra attention to the novelty of the paper. Is the contribution novel? This is essential for a journal paper.
• A review should critique the work, not the authors! Reviews must be objective and mindful, and must avoid emotional, condescending, joking, accusing, attacking, or aggressive language. As per IEEE PSPB Manual section 2.6, "... reviewers should avoid the use of ad hominem and deprecating comments in their review and judgment statements for communications with authors."
• Reviews should give detailed constructive comments that authors can use to improve their work. Please avoid generalizations and subjective comments. Please be very specific, providing objective and detailed comments.
• From a scientific perspective, both authors and reviewers must support their statements. As such, a review should not make statements like “it is a fact that…” or “everyone knows that …” without proof. Instead, it should include citations for those claims.
• Since J-ISPIN is a Gold Open Access journal, there is no official limit to the number of pages that constitute the submission. However, authors are encouraged to consider eight pages as an appropriate length for publication of the final article. Although some papers may not be able to reveal the findings of the authors in eight pages, experience indicates that most will be able to do so. You should make sure that the length of the submission is consistent with its contents, so to avoid overlong papers. Authors are required to submit a cover letter for papers over ten pages in length (including references and biographies) containing an explanation for why their manuscript is over the recommended length.

• If a paper under review is already in a preprint repository but has not been published anywhere else, it is an acceptable submission to J-ISPIN, since posting of preprints is not considered prior publication.
• Please do not ask authors to cite or compare against a paper that appears only in a preprint repository, because such papers are not peer-reviewed publications. If you know of an interesting preprint paper that authors need to look at, you are welcome to tell the authors about it, for their perusal, but make sure you don’t ask for its inclusion among the references.

The IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation your willingness to act as a reviewer and will do everything possible so that you are not overwhelmed with review requests. Our goal is to allow you to complete one review before requesting your further involvement.

Once again, thank you for serving as a reviewer for the IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation, as your participation adds great value to the peer review process. We endeavour not just to have our Authors pass judgment, but also work with them towards writing and publishing better papers, to the benefit of the whole Positioning and Navigation community.