Reviewer Guidelines

Reviewer Guidelines

Dinamika Penelitian: Media Komunikasi Penelitian Sosial Keagamaan applies a double-anonymous external peer-review process to ensure the academic quality, originality, methodological rigor, ethical integrity, and relevance of all published manuscripts. Reviewers play an essential role in helping editors make fair editorial decisions and in assisting authors to improve the quality of their manuscripts.

These guidelines should be read together with the journal’s Peer Review Process, Publication Ethics and Research Integrity, and relevant COPE Guidance and Tools.

Role of Reviewers

Reviewers are invited because of their expertise in a relevant field, method, theoretical perspective, or socio-religious context. Their role is to provide an objective, constructive, evidence-based, and academically respectful assessment of the manuscript.

Reviewer recommendations are advisory. The final decision regarding acceptance, revision, or rejection is made by the Editor-in-Chief or responsible editor based on the manuscript’s scholarly quality, ethical compliance, relevance to the journal’s scope, reviewer reports, and author responses.

Confidentiality

Manuscripts under review are confidential documents. Reviewers must not share, discuss, copy, cite, or use any part of the manuscript, review report, data, figures, tables, field notes, interview excerpts, or supplementary materials before publication.

Reviewers must not disclose their identity to the authors or attempt to identify the authors during the double-anonymous review process. If the reviewer accidentally identifies the authors or believes anonymity has been compromised, this should be reported to the editor.

Reviewers must not upload manuscripts or unpublished materials to public generative artificial intelligence platforms, translation tools, external editing services, or other systems that do not guarantee confidentiality and data protection.

Conflict of Interest

Reviewers must decline the invitation or inform the editor when they have an actual, potential, or perceived conflict of interest. Conflicts may include the same institutional affiliation as the authors, recent co-authorship or research collaboration, supervisory relationships, personal relationships, academic competition, financial interests, consultancy, political or religious authority relationships, community leadership roles, or other circumstances that may affect impartial judgment.

If a conflict of interest becomes apparent after the review has begun, the reviewer must immediately inform the editor. The editor will decide whether the reviewer should continue, withdraw, or provide only limited technical advice.

Timeliness

Reviewers should accept an invitation only when they can complete the review within the agreed period. If a reviewer is unable to complete the review on time, they should inform the editor as soon as possible.

When declining a review invitation, reviewers are encouraged to suggest alternative qualified reviewers, provided that the suggested individuals have no known conflict of interest with the manuscript or authors.

Review Criteria

Reviewers should evaluate the manuscript based on its relevance to the journal’s aims and scope, originality, academic contribution, theoretical grounding, methodological quality, ethical compliance, clarity of analysis, consistency between findings and conclusions, quality of writing, and relevance of references.

For manuscripts on Islam, Muslim societies, socio-religious life, community empowerment, community development, religious institutions, family life, digital society, policy engagement, or social transformation, reviewers should assess whether the manuscript contributes to broader scholarly discussion and not merely describe a local case.

For empirical studies, reviewers should examine the clarity of the research problem, appropriateness of the design, adequacy of data collection, transparency of analysis, trustworthiness or validity of findings, and strength of interpretation. For literature-based studies, reviewers should assess the clarity of search or selection procedures, analytical framework, synthesis quality, and originality of argument.

For ethnography, digital ethnography, participatory action research, community-based research, and fieldwork, reviewers should consider whether the manuscript explains field access, participant or community involvement, ethical safeguards, researcher positioning, data interpretation, and the connection between empirical evidence and scholarly claims.

Ethical Considerations

Reviewers should pay close attention to ethical issues, particularly in research involving human participants, religious communities, vulnerable groups, families, children, schools, community organizations, digital communities, local institutions, or sensitive socio-religious data.

Reviewers should inform the editor if they identify possible problems related to informed consent, participant confidentiality, community permission, exposure of sensitive information, misrepresentation of communities, data fabrication, data falsification, plagiarism, duplicate publication, inappropriate authorship, citation manipulation, or undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Reviewers should not investigate suspected misconduct independently by contacting authors, participants, institutions, or communities. All concerns must be communicated confidentially to the editor.

Structure of the Review Report

A useful review report should begin with a short summary of the manuscript’s topic, purpose, method, and main contribution. This summary helps the editor understand how the reviewer has interpreted the manuscript.

The report should then identify the manuscript’s strengths, followed by major issues that affect its contribution, methodology, analysis, ethics, or structure. Minor issues such as language, formatting, citation style, table presentation, or typographical errors should be separated from major scholarly concerns.

Reviewer comments should be specific and actionable. Reviewers should explain why a change is needed and, where appropriate, suggest how the authors may improve the manuscript.

Major Issues

Major issues may include weak alignment with the journal’s scope, unclear research problem, insufficient novelty, inadequate theoretical grounding, inappropriate methodology, unclear sampling or participant selection, insufficient data analysis, unsupported interpretation, ethical uncertainty, poor integration of findings and discussion, or conclusions that are not supported by the evidence.

When recommending major revision or rejection, reviewers should clearly explain the reasons so that the editor and authors can understand the basis of the recommendation.

Minor Issues

Minor issues may include unclear sentences, inconsistent terminology, missing references, formatting problems, incomplete table or figure captions, language errors, or small improvements in structure and presentation.

Reviewers should not allow minor language issues to overshadow the scholarly evaluation of the manuscript. However, when language problems seriously affect readability or interpretation, reviewers should state this clearly.

Citation Recommendations

Reviewers may suggest additional references only when the sources are directly relevant and academically necessary. Citation recommendations must not be intended to increase the reviewer’s citations, the journal’s citations, institutional metrics, or the visibility of a particular author or publication.

The journal prohibits coercive citation, irrelevant citation, citation stacking, excessive self-citation, and citation manipulation.

Reviewer Recommendations

Reviewers may recommend one of the following editorial decisions:

Accept without revision;
Accept with minor revisions;
Reconsider after major revisions;
Resubmit for a new round of review; or
Reject.

The recommendation should be consistent with the written comments. A recommendation for acceptance should only be made when the manuscript is already strong, ethical, methodologically sound, and suitable for publication. A recommendation for rejection should be supported by clear scholarly, methodological, ethical, or scope-related reasons.

Respectful and Constructive Language

Reviewers must use professional and respectful language. Comments should focus on the manuscript, not the authors. Personal criticism, discriminatory remarks, sarcasm, offensive language, or dismissive statements are not acceptable.

Even when recommending rejection, reviewers should provide comments that are fair, evidence-based, and useful for scholarly improvement.

Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence by Reviewers

Reviewers must not use generative artificial intelligence tools to evaluate confidential manuscripts unless the journal has explicitly authorized such use and the tool guarantees confidentiality and data protection.

AI tools must not be used to replace scholarly judgment, generate reviewer reports without careful human assessment, identify authors, expose confidential data, or upload unpublished manuscripts to public platforms.

Reviewers remain fully responsible for the accuracy, confidentiality, fairness, and integrity of their review reports.

Post-Review Responsibilities

After submitting a review, reviewers should continue to treat the manuscript and review process as confidential. They must not use unpublished information from the manuscript for their own research, teaching, publication, grant applications, public presentations, or professional advantage.

When invited to review a revised manuscript, reviewers should focus on whether the authors have adequately addressed previous comments and whether new issues have emerged from the revision.

Recognition of Reviewers

Dinamika Penelitian appreciates the scholarly contribution of reviewers. Reviewer contributions may be acknowledged through reviewer lists, certificates, or other forms of recognition, provided that confidentiality of individual manuscripts and review reports is preserved.

Reviewer identities will not be disclosed to authors without explicit consent and editorial approval.

Related Policies and Standards

These guidelines should be read together with the journal’s Peer Review Process, Publication Ethics and Research Integrity, Plagiarism Check Policy, Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern Policy, and Appeals and Complaints Policy.

The journal also refers to relevant COPE Guidance and Tools and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.