Peer Review Policy

Review process

1. Submission. Manuscripts are submitted through the journal's online submission system. Author names and affiliations are removed from the files sent to reviewers.
2. Initial editorial screening. The editorial office checks that the manuscript is within the journal's scope, is complete, follows the author guidelines, meets ethical requirements and passes a similarity check (see Plagiarism Policy). Manuscripts that do not meet these requirements may be declined without external review.
3. Assignment. The Editor-in-Chief, or an editor acting on the Editor-in-Chief's behalf, invites at least two independent reviewers with expertise in the subject. Reviewers must have no conflict of interest with the authors and must not belong to the same institution as any author.
4. Review. Reviewers assess the manuscript against the criteria below and recommend one of: accept, minor revision, major revision or reject.
5. Decision. The handling editor weighs the reviewers' reports and makes a decision. Authors receive the decision together with the anonymised reviewer comments.
6. Revision. Authors respond to every comment and submit a revised manuscript. Revised manuscripts may be returned to the original reviewers, and further rounds of review may be requested.
7. Acceptance and production. The final decision rests with the Editor-in-Chief. Accepted manuscripts are copy-edited, proofs are sent to the authors, a DOI is registered and the article is published in the next issue.

Review criteria

• Originality and significance of the contribution
• Soundness of the methodology and of the experimental design
• Quality of the data and validity of the results
• Reproducibility of the work
• Clarity of presentation and quality of the discussion
• Relevance and completeness of the references
• Compliance with research and publication ethics

Timelines

The journal aims to send a first decision within four weeks of submission. Reviewers are asked to return their reports within two to three weeks. On average, about six weeks pass between the submission and the publication of an accepted article. The dates on which an article was received, accepted and published are shown on its article page.

Confidentiality

Manuscripts, reviewer reports and correspondence are confidential. Editors and reviewers must not share or use unpublished material from a submission. Reviewer identities are not disclosed to authors.

Editorial independence

Decisions are based only on scholarly merit, originality, relevance to the journal's scope and compliance with ethical standards. They are not influenced by the authors' nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs or institutional affiliation, nor by the publisher or any commercial interest.

Submissions from editors and board members

Editors and editorial board members may submit their own work to the journal. They take no part in the handling of their manuscript: it is assigned to an independent editor and reviewed under the same double-blind process, and the author has no access to the review records. Research articles with an author who is an editor, board member or reviewer of the journal make up no more than 25% of the research articles in any issue.

Special issues

PIQM publishes regular issues. If a special issue is published, it must fall within the scope of the journal, its articles are labelled as part of the special issue, and every article goes through the same double-blind peer review by external reviewers as a regular submission. The Editor-in-Chief approves the credentials of any guest editor and oversees the special issue. Papers authored by a guest editor are handled by an independent editor and may make up no more than 25% of the issue.

Use of AI tools in peer review

Reviewers and editors must not upload manuscripts to generative AI tools. See the policy on the Use of AI and AI-Assisted Tools.

Appeals

Authors who believe that a decision was based on a factual error or on bias may appeal as described in the Complaints and Appeals policy.