General Information

All Original Articles, Review Articles, and Case Report/Series, submitted to the Journal of Mashhad Dental School go under an initial screening by the editorial office before inviting reviewers. The manuscript's topic will be checked to adapt to the scope of Journal of Mashhad Dental School. Incomplete submissions without the required documents will be back to the author’s submission dashboard in his/her profile, which can be found under the “Submissions Sent Back to Author” link. The initial evaluation will be done in 2-4 days after submission.

We ask authors and peer-reviewers to submit their articles and reports via our secure online system. There is an online help guide to assist in using this system, and a helpdesk email account for any technical problems.

Editorial Decisions

Editor in Chief reviews the comments of the reviewers and makes a decision that may be: accept, minor revision, major revision or reject. It is unusual for an article to be accepted with no revision at this step. If revision is requested, the reviewers' comments will be sent to the authors for point by point response and revision of the article.

Double Blind Peer Review

Journal of Mashhad Dental School offers a double-blind peer review option. Neither the peer reviewers nor the authors are revealed to each other. Authors may suggest preferred and non-preferred reviewers during manuscript submission. However, the ultimate selection of the reviewers will be determined by the editor(s).

Peer Review Process

The peer-review process is the main mechanism for ensuring the quality of published articles. To this end, the submitted articles are rigorously peer-reviewed to ensure the high quality submissions are accepted and published. The decision to accept a manuscript is not based solely on the scientific validity and originality of the study content; other factors are considered, including the level of innovation, extent and importance of new information in the paper as compared with that in other papers being considered, the Journal's need to represent a wide range of topics, and the overall suitability for Journal. Editors select typically two reviewers, experts in the topic. Often, we also include one expert for statistics or a particular technique.

Timing

Journal of Mashhad Dental School is committed to rapid editorial decisions and publication, and we believe that an efficient editorial process is a valuable service both to our authors and to the scientific community as a whole. We therefore ask reviewers to respond promptly within a couple of weeks. If reviewers anticipate a longer delay than previously expected, we ask them to let us know so that we can keep the authors informed and, where necessary, find alternatives.

The whole review process depends on receiving referees comments and revising the manuscripts by the author based on the reviewers comments and may take 3 months. Upon receipt of the revised article from the author and after final approval by referees, final decision will be done by the editor in chief and notification letter will be sent to the corresponding author.