Al-Jabir operates double-anonymous peer review. Authors do not know the identity of their reviewers, and reviewers are not told the identity of the authors. Manuscripts must therefore be prepared for anonymous review, with author names, affiliations, acknowledgements, and self-identifying references removed from the main manuscript file and supplied separately.

How a submission is handled

1. Initial editorial screening. Every submission is first assessed by an editor for scope, completeness, and basic methodological soundness, and is checked for originality. Manuscripts that fall outside our scope or that do not meet minimum standards are returned to the author without external review, normally within one week, so that authors can submit elsewhere without delay.
2. External review. Manuscripts that pass screening are sent to a minimum of two independent external reviewers with relevant expertise. Reviewers are asked to declare any conflict of interest and to decline if one exists.
3. Editorial decision. The handling editor makes a decision on the basis of the reviewers' reports: accept, minor revision, major revision, or reject. Where reviewers disagree substantively, a third reviewer is consulted before a decision is made.
4. Revision. Authors receive the full, anonymised reviewer reports. Revised manuscripts are returned to the original reviewers where further assessment is needed.
5. Final decision and publication. Accepted articles are copy-edited, typeset, assigned a DOI, and published.

Timelines

We aim for a first decision within eight weeks of submission. Where this is not achievable, most often because a reviewer withdraws late, we will tell the author rather than leave the submission silent.

Reviewer conduct

Reviewers are required to treat manuscripts as confidential, to review only within their competence, to declare conflicts of interest, and to base their assessment on the work rather than on the perceived identity or location of its authors. Reviewers must not use unpublished material from a manuscript in their own work, and must not use AI systems to generate reviews or to process confidential manuscript content.