Reviewer Guidelines
Thank you for contributing your expertise to Passerelle. As a reviewer, you are the primary guardian of the journal's scientific integrity. Your expert assessment is the cornerstone of our rigorous double-blind peer-review process and is essential for maintaining the highest standards of originality, methodological rigor, and scholarly contribution.
These guidelines outline your core responsibilities, the criteria for evaluation, and the formal expectations attached to your role.
1. The Reviewer's Mandate: Core Ethics
By accepting a review, you enter a position of trust and are bound by the following ethical obligations.
A. Absolute Confidentiality
All manuscripts are privileged, confidential documents. You must not show, discuss, or share the manuscript or its ideas with any other person without explicit permission from the editor. You must not use any unpublished information or ideas from the manuscript for your own research, teaching, or professional advantage. Your duty of confidentiality continues after the review is completed.
B. Uncompromising Objectivity
Your assessment must be scrupulously objective. All judgments should be formulated clearly and supported by relevant arguments grounded in the manuscript. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate and will not be accepted. Your focus must remain on the academic merit, methodological soundness, and scientific quality of the work. If you feel unqualified to assess specific aspects of the manuscript, you should indicate this in your confidential comments to the editor.
C. Conflict of Interest (COI)
You must not review a manuscript if you have any conflict of interest. You must immediately decline the invitation if you have a competitive, collaborative, supervisory, or other significant relationship with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the manuscript, or if you believe you can identify the authors in a way that compromises the double-blind process. If you are unsure, you must notify the editor immediately and request clarification before proceeding.
→ Read our full Conflict of Interest Policy
D. Professional Timeliness
We rely on your punctuality to ensure an efficient publication process for our authors. You must agree to complete your review within the timeframe requested by the editorial office. If you cannot meet the deadline, please inform the editor immediately so that a revised deadline or an alternative reviewer can be arranged. If you realize after accepting the invitation that you cannot complete the review, you should decline promptly.
2. The Evaluation: What to Assess
Your review must provide a rigorous, comprehensive evaluation of the manuscript's quality and contribution, not only a brief opinion or a recommendation.
Core Assessment Criteria
Please assess the manuscript according to the following criteria:
- Scope & Fit: Does the work align with the journal's Aims and Scope? Is the topic clearly situated within the fields covered by Passerelle and relevant to its readership?
- Originality & Significance: Is this high-quality, original scientific research? Does it offer a clear and demonstrable contribution to theoretical, methodological, or practical knowledge in its field?
- Methodology & Rigor: Is the research design appropriate and coherent with the research questions or hypotheses? Are the data, analytical procedures, and interpretations accurate, transparent, and robust?
- Argument & Support: Is the central argument clearly formulated, logically developed, and consistently supported by evidence, analysis, and appropriate reasoning?
- Literature: Does the author demonstrate mastery of the relevant scholarly literature? Are references current, accurate, and sufficient, and do they position the work appropriately within existing debates?
- Clarity: Is the manuscript well-written, well-structured, and accessible to an international academic audience? Are sections, headings, and transitions clear and coherent?
Critical Ethical Checks (Red Flags)
As our primary line of defense, you are explicitly instructed to report any suspicion of misconduct to the editor through your confidential comments.
- Plagiarism: Passerelle maintains a zero-tolerance policy for plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and duplicate submission. Report any improper reuse of text, data, figures, or ideas immediately.
→ Read our full Plagiarism Policy - Generative AI: AI tools cannot be listed as authors. Authors must declare AI use when it exceeds basic editing. Report any suspicion of undisclosed or inappropriate AI usage.
→ Read our full Generative AI Policy - Data Integrity: Watch for signs of fabrication, falsification, or manipulation. Verify that data support the claims made and that the Data Availability Statement (DAS) is present and coherent with the research.
→ Read our full Data Sharing Policy - Ethical Standards: Report missing ethical approval for human or animal research, absence of informed consent, breaches of participant privacy, or any violation of ethical research conduct.
→ Read our Ethical Standards - Peer Review Integrity: Report any attempt by authors to reveal their identity, influence your evaluation, or manipulate the double-blind review process. Flag self-identifying content left in the manuscript.
→ Read our Peer Review Process - Copyright & Permissions: Report any use of copyrighted tables, images, figures, or text without permission, or any material that appears improperly licensed or reused.
→ Read our Copyright Policy - Conflict of Interest: Report signs of undeclared financial, institutional, or collaborative conflicts. Notify the editor if funding statements or acknowledgments appear inconsistent with the research.
→ Read our Conflict of Interest Policy - Publication Malpractice: Report ghost authorship, honorary authorship, redundant publication, salami slicing, fabricated citations, or any misconduct covered by international publication ethics.
→ Read our Publication Malpractice Statement - Archiving & Version Consistency: Report contradictions between the submitted manuscript and publicly available preprint or archived versions, or inconsistencies in datasets supposedly preserved in repositories.
→ Read our Archiving Policy - Retraction-Level Issues: Report severe ethical breaches, unreliable data, or fundamental methodological flaws that may justify rejection or could lead to retraction if undetected.
→ Read our Withdrawal / Retraction Policy - Privacy & Sensitive Data: Report manuscripts containing identifiable personal data, confidential information, medical details, or sensitive materials without anonymization or consent.
→ Read our Privacy Statement
3. Writing & Submitting Your Report
Your written report is the most critical tool for both the editor and the author. It must be detailed, constructive, and professional. Focus on explaining your evaluation, not only on indicating a decision, and avoid purely summary remarks that do not help the author improve the work.
The ASJP Review Form (Mandatory)
All reviews for Passerelle are submitted through the ASJP online review form. This form guides you through all required criteria and provides separate fields for your comments to the author and to the editor, as well as checkboxes, rating scales, and radio buttons for your overall assessment.
Please answer all questions in the ASJP form carefully and use the comment boxes to justify your ratings and recommendation.
Key Components of Your Report
Within the ASJP form, your review must clearly distinguish between:
- 1. Comments to the Author: This feedback will be anonymized and sent to the author. It must be constructive, detailed, and respectful in tone. Provide specific, actionable advice on how to improve the manuscript, indicating where arguments, methods, data presentation, or writing require clarification or strengthening.
- 2. Confidential Comments to the Editor: This section is only for the editor. Provide your candid assessment of the work's quality, its priority for the journal, and any ethical or methodological concerns. This is where you must report all issues related to plagiarism, conflicts of interest, data integrity, or serious flaws that, in your view, cannot be addressed through revision.
- 3. Final Recommendation: In the ASJP form you will choose one of the standard outcomes using the corresponding option (radio button or drop down):
- Acceptance: The manuscript can be accepted in its current form or with only minor editorial corrections by the journal.
- Minor Revisions: The manuscript is fundamentally sound and publishable, but requires limited changes that the authors can reasonably address within a short timeframe.
- Major Revisions: The manuscript has potential, but substantial changes are needed in terms of theory, methodology, analysis, or structure before it can be reconsidered.
- Rejection: The manuscript does not meet the journal's standards of quality, originality, or fit, or presents issues that cannot be resolved through revision.
4. How to Join & Review
The ASJP Platform
Passerelle manages its entire double-blind peer-review process via the Algerian Scientific Journal Platform (ASJP). To accept invitations, download manuscripts, and submit your final review, you must have an active account on the ASJP platform and keep your contact details, institutional affiliation, and areas of expertise up to date.
Become a Reviewer
We are continuously seeking qualified experts to join our distinguished international scientific and editorial committee. If you wish to be considered as a reviewer for Passerelle, please download and complete the Reviewer Candidature Form.
Reviewer Candidature Form
By completing this form, you declare your availability to evaluate articles within your fields of expertise and your commitment to respecting the journal's ethical charter and peer-review policies. Please fill it out carefully and return it to the editorial office using the contact details indicated in the form.