Peer Review Process

Authorship

As stated in the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, credit for authorship requires substantial contributions to: 1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND 2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND 3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND 4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

All authors must sign authorship form attesting that they fulfill the authorship criteria. Your submitted manuscript will not be processed unless this form is sent. There should be a statement in manuscript explaining contribution of each author to the work. Those contributors who did not fulfill authorship criteria should be listed in acknowledgments.

Any change in authorship after submission must be approved in writing by all authors. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship. The order of authorship should be a joint decision of the co-authors. Assurance that all authors of the paper have fulfilled these criteria for authorship should be given in the covering letter.

Review process

Once the manuscript is received by the journal office, a blind copy is sent to the editorial board for initial reviewing. The comments of editorial board are discussed in the weekly meetings of the editorial board. Possible decisions in this step may be rejection, requiring minor revisions before being sent to the reviewers or sufficient enough to be sent to the reviewers. A notification letter, along with the article code for all further correspondences, is sent to the corresponding author. Those articles with sufficient quality for peer-reviewing are sent to four experts in the field to be reviewed via a double-blinded process. As soon as receiving at least 2 reviewers’ comments, they are discussed in the editorial board meeting. Possible decisions in this step may be accepting as it is, requiring revision to be published or rejection. In the case of needing revision the reviewers’ comments are forwarded to the corresponding author for final revision. After receiving the revised manuscript, provided that the authors fulfill all reviewers’ comments, the manuscript is scheduled for publication in the next issue.

As Addiction and health is a rapid response journal, the review process takes between 2 to 4 weeks.

 

  • Reviewers' and authors' identities are kept confidential.
  • The existence of a submitted manuscript is not revealed to anyone other than the reviewers and editorial staff.
  • Reviewers are required to keep manuscripts and their information confidential.
  • They should not use knowledge of the manuscript before its publication for their personal interests.
  • The reviewers' comments should be constructive, honest, and polite.