The editorial board of Foundations and Trends® in Information Systems (FnTIS) is grateful for the important contributions of our reviewers. To support you in evaluating a manuscript, we share the following guidelines.
As part of the scientific peer review process, you are asked to provide a detailed, educative narrative evaluation that the action editor will send to the authors.
We encourage you as a reviewer to see yourself as an anonymous consultant for every author, even (and especially) for manuscripts you believe should be rejected. Aspire to provide sufficiently helpful, educative feedback so that the next manuscript submitted by these authors makes a substantial contribution to the literature and is of publishable quality. In this way, you will fulfill the second vitally important role of FnTIS reviewer: that of contributing to the development of future scholarship.
It may be helpful to think in terms of the answers to three sequential questions:
- Is the topic of the manuscript appropriate for FnTIS?
- Does the manuscript make a significant scientific contribution?
- Can the flaws in this manuscript be remedied in a revision?
Confidentiality
The manuscripts to be reviewed are considered confidential communication. Once an unpublished manuscript is set in a fixed, tangible form (e.g., typed on a page), it is entitled to copyright protection. The author of an unpublished manuscript owns the copyright.
Narrative Evaluation
Your comments to authors will be read both by the authors and by the editors. They should provide a critical but constructive review, in a considerate and impartial tone. They should not reveal your confidential recommendation to reject, revise, or accept the paper, or your opinion as to whether it should be published.
The actual decision to reject, revise, or accept the paper will be made by the editors, not by the reviewers. Null results, by themselves, also provide an insufficient basis for rejection of a manuscript. If a study addresses an important question or tests an interesting hypothesis, and if it is well designed and well executed, it can be informative even if the results are null.
General style
The narrative should be phrased as a communication between you and the author about the manuscript. Please refer to the authors of the manuscript sparingly and, when doing so, use the third person. Critical feedback tends to be easier to accept when a review refers to some aspect of “the manuscript” and avoids phrasing in the second person.
Organization
For both the action editors and the authors, clear separation of major and minor points is crucial. A more effective review will emerge when you are able to separate the forest from the trees. Numbering your points facilitates the action editor’s reference to your review in the editorial decision letter.
Please refrain from bias-free language. Reviewers have the option to include an early career colleague, postdoc, or student as a co-reviewer on a manuscript. The co-reviewer’s name can be added when the review is submitted in Editorial Manager. We encourage reviewers to consider engaging their early career colleagues or students in the FnTIS review process.