Peer-reviewing

Double-blind peer review procedure

The independent experts or members of the editorial board can become reviewers. Reviewers provide their expert opinion on a voluntary and gratuitous basis.

Reviewing of the manuscripts is carried out by the following provisions:

1. The editors invite recognized experts in corresponding areas to evaluate manuscripts. Only a scholar who has published at least one academic article or monograph during the last three years on the research area of the submitted manuscript can become a reviewer.
2. The Moscow University Economics Bulletin uses a "double-blind" peer-review approach. This means reviewers do not know the identity of the authors, and the authors do not know the identity of the reviewers.
3. Every manuscript should be evaluated by at least two reviewers.
4. It is the editor’s discretion to choose reviewers. The editorial office sends a letter of invitation to a potential reviewer, providing the title and abstract of the manuscript.
5. Reviewers get access to the full text of the manuscript after they have confirmed their readiness to perform a review at the personal account at ElPub. To ensure the double-blind review procedure, the file of the manuscript should not contain information about the author or any element of the text that allows identifying the authorship.
6. The editorial office asks the reviewers to provide their expert opinion on the manuscript within 4 weeks.
7. As a result of the evaluation, the reviewers send their comments and recommendations to the editorial office. They can provide one of the following recommendations: (1) Provisional acceptance (the manuscript is provisionally recommended to accepted); (2) Minor revision (the authors should address the reviewers’ concerns and improve the manuscript, the re-review is not needed); (3) Major revision (the authors should revise to the manuscript in regard with reviewers’ comments, the revised version will be sent back to some or all of the original reviewers); (4) Reject (in case, in the reviewer’s opinion, the manuscript does not correspond to the academic level or the scope of the journal, the quality of work is low, and the manuscript cannot be sufficiently improved).
8. Once two reviews are received, the editorial office sends the results of the review round with the anonymized reviews attached.   
9. The corresponding author should notify the editorial office whether the authors are going to revise the manuscript or prefer to withdraw it.
10. The corresponding author should upload the revised manuscript at the personal account at ElPub under the same paper ID (see. slides 16-17 of the ElPub author manual). 
11. If the reviewers recommend the major revision, the editorial office sends the revised manuscript to the original reviewers who have requested the re-review and asks them to provide their expert opinion within 4 weeks.
12. If the reviewers recommend the minor revision, the revised manuscript does not need to be re-reviewed. The editor delivers it to the editorial board for the final decision.

If the manuscript is rejected at the peer review stage the editorial office notifies authors attaching the anonymized reviews.

The editorial office is obliged to provide the reviews on published articles when an expert committee of the Higher Attestation Commission and Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russian Federation. The editorial office shall keep the reviews for 5 years.