Information For Reviewers

First steps:

Before you accept or decline an invitation to review, please consider the following:
•    Does the article match your area of expertise? Only accept if you feel you can provide a high-quality review.
•    Do you have a potential conflict of interest? State this to the editor when you respond. Please consult the respective Soil Organisms policy to find-out more about the potential sources of conflict of interest.
•    Do you have time to make a high-quality review? Please, note the standard desired review time at Soil Organisms is up to 1 month.
•    Do you need to find out more about reviewing and the peer review process? If so, please see guidelines below.
Please, respond to the invitation as soon as you can (even to decline). If you decline the invitation, the editors of Soil Organisms would appreciate receiving suggestions on alternative competent reviewers.

Preparing your review

Confidentiality
If you accept to provide a review, you must treat the materials you receive as confidential. This means you can’t share them with anyone without prior authorization from the Soil Organisms editor handling the submission that you are going to review. Since the peer-review process is confidential, you also must not share your review and even the fact that you are making a review with anyone without permission from the editors (who would also have to agree with the authors on that matter).
This confidentiality requirement extends to the peer-review report and any other communication about the manuscript, such as comments in the manuscript or the notification or decision letters, as they may also contain confidential information about the manuscript and/or the authors.

Generative AI
Reviewers or editors should not upload the manuscript, or any associated correspondence or any part of it into a Generative AI tool, as there is no guarantee of where materials are being sent, saved, or viewed, or how they may be used in the future; and this may violate the authors’ confidentiality, intellectual property, or privacy policies. The same applies even if it is just for the purpose of improving language and readability.

How to log in and access your review
Your review will be managed via the Soil Organisms OJS submission system, where you will be registered. 

Specific instructions
When you write the review, make sure you carefully read Soil Organisms Author guidelines.
In any review, please keep the author (instead of the editor) in mind when preparing your comments.
Although Soil Organisms practices a double-blind peer-review process, stay polite and constructive. Clearly justify your points of critique using solely scientific arguments. The review structure in Soil Organisms is not fixed, but you may wish to consider following questions to answer, depending on the submission type:

Regular research article
•    Examine the importance and novelty of the research question addressed in the manuscript (e.g., are objectives and justification clearly stated and are novel?). Note that assessments of potential impact of the work is not important to Soil Organisms, as we aim to publish research that is scientifically sound.
•    Assess the originality (contribution, addition of knowledge to scientific literature or field) of the manuscript; again, as long as the manuscript is scientifically sound and has not been published before, it may be a relevant paper for Soil Organisms.
•    Clearly identify the strengths and weaknesses of the method described in the manuscript. Pay special attention to statistical design and its feasibility, if applicable.
•    Make specific useful comments on the writing and structure of the manuscript (e.g., writing, style, organization, figures, etc.).
•    Provide specific comments on the author’s interpretation of the results and conclusions drawn from the results.

Review article and other types of submissions
•    Evaluate the importance of the topic/scope of the review.
•    Assess the originality of the review.
•    Comment on the author's representation of the most relevant recent advances in the field; specifically, determine whether the references are relevant to the topic and cover both historical literature and more recent developments.
•    Offer comments on the writing, organization, tables, and figures of the manuscript.
•    Comment on the author's interpretation of the results.

Methodology
If the manuscript you are reviewing is reporting results of a field work, an experiment, or a metanalysis, check the methods section first. The following cases are considered major flaws and should be flagged:
•    Unsound or discredited methodology
•    Missing processes known to be influential on the area of reported research
•    Comprehensive description ensuring the study reproducibility
•    A conclusion drawn in contradiction to the statistical or qualitative evidence reported in the manuscript

Research data and statistical design
Critical issues in research data and statistical design, which are considered to be major flaws can be related to insufficient data points, statistically non-significant variations reported as effects and unclear data tables. Please, also check, if results reported are reproducible basing on the data availability and statistics description. Soil Organisms require authors to share raw data underlying results of the analysis.

Visualizations
Please check if all visualizations are of sufficient optical quality, self-explaining, and necessary. 

Ethical considerations
Experiments including animal data should properly be documented. Check, whether authors require to provide ethical approval by the author’s host organization for their experiments. Please also consult Soil Organisms policies on ethics.

Your recommendation
When you make a recommendation, it is worth considering the categories the editor will likely use for classifying the article:
•    Reject — explain your reasoning in your report.
•    Accept without revision.
•    Revise — either with the need of re-evaluation or without it. Explain the revision that is required, and indicate to the editor whether you would be happy to review the revised article. If you are recommending a revision, you must provide the author with a clear, sound explanation of why this is necessary, referring to specific parts of the manuscript.

After your review
Do not forget that, even after finalizing your review, you must treat the article and any linked files or data as confidential. This means you must not share them or information about the review with anyone without prior authorization from the editor.

We invite you to read the following article, providing detailed information, on what a good review could contain: 
Berk, Jonathan B. and Harvey, Campbell R. and Hirshleifer, David, A Checklist for Reviewing a Paper (December 21, 2016). Duke I&E Research Paper No. 2017-03, Stanford University Graduate School of Business Research Paper No. 17-6, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2887708 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.288770