Reviewer Guidelines

Plant Science Horizons (PSH) relies on qualified peer reviewers to evaluate scientific validity, originality, methodological rigor, interpretation, reporting quality, and relevance. Reviews should help editors reach fair decisions while giving authors clear, evidence-based guidance for improving their work.

Purpose of peer review

Peer reviewers advise the editors on the scientific quality and suitability of submitted manuscripts. Reviewers do not make the final publication decision; their reports form part of the evidence considered by the handling editor.

A strong review should assess the work rigorously, identify major strengths and limitations, distinguish essential revisions from optional suggestions, and help authors improve scientific clarity without attempting to rewrite the manuscript according to the reviewer's personal preferences.

Assess expertise, availability and independence

Before accepting a review invitation, reviewers should confirm that they:

If a reviewer can assess only part of the manuscript, this should be disclosed to the editor when accepting the invitation or in the confidential comments.

Decline promptly when appropriate

A reviewer should decline when:

• The manuscript lies substantially outside the reviewer's expertise.
• The review cannot reasonably be completed within the requested timeframe.
• A conflict of interest may compromise or reasonably appear to compromise impartiality.
• The reviewer recognizes the authors and believes this would undermine the journal's double-blind process or independent judgment.
• The reviewer has already reviewed essentially the same manuscript for another journal and confidentiality or other circumstances prevent an independent review.

Disclose actual, potential and perceived conflicts

Reviewers should inform the editor of relationships or interests that could influence, or reasonably be perceived to influence, the review.

Disclosure does not automatically disqualify a reviewer; the editor determines whether the conflict is manageable.

Treat all manuscript materials as confidential

• Do not share, forward, reproduce, post, or discuss the manuscript outside the authorized review process.
• Do not use unpublished ideas, data, methods, figures, code, or results for personal research or competitive advantage.
• Do not contact the authors directly about the manuscript.
• Do not reveal the existence or content of the manuscript to colleagues except where the editor has explicitly approved additional reviewer involvement.
• Confidentiality continues after the review is completed, regardless of whether the manuscript is accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

Protect author and reviewer anonymity

PSH uses double-blind review. Reviewers should not attempt to identify authors unnecessarily through internet searches, preprint searches, citation patterns, institutional clues, metadata investigation, or other means solely to discover author identity.

If the authors' identities become apparent incidentally and this creates a conflict or affects impartiality, the reviewer should notify the editor.

Do not compromise confidentiality through AI services

Manuscripts under peer review are confidential. Reviewers must not upload manuscript text, figures, tables, supplementary files, unpublished data, or identifiable editorial correspondence to external generative-AI systems, public AI detectors, translation platforms, or other services when this could expose confidential content.

Reviewers remain fully responsible for their scientific reasoning, factual accuracy, recommendation, and wording. AI-generated review reports must not substitute for expert evaluation.

Routine local tools that do not transmit confidential manuscript content externally may be used only where consistent with journal, institutional, privacy, and data-security requirements.

Questions to consider when reviewing

Evaluate contribution, not author prestige

Reviewers should assess what the manuscript adds to existing knowledge and whether the advance is adequately supported. Novelty may be conceptual, mechanistic, methodological, technological, computational, resource-based, or applied.

Assessment should not depend on the perceived status of the authors, institution, country, funding source, or whether the findings are positive, negative, confirmatory, or unexpected.

Experimental design and reproducibility

• Are experimental units, treatments, controls, biological replicates, and sampling procedures adequately described?
• Are controls appropriate for the central conclusions?
• Are methods sufficiently detailed to permit informed evaluation and reasonable reproduction?
• Are critical reagents, genotypes, biological resources, databases, instruments, software, and parameters appropriately identified?
• Do the methods match the research question and the type of inference being made?
• Are important limitations or sources of bias acknowledged?

Plant materials and experimental context

Where relevant, reviewers should check whether authors report:

• Species, cultivar, accession, ecotype, genotype, mutant, transgenic, or edited line information.
• Source and validation of biological materials.
• Growth conditions, developmental stage, treatment timing, light, temperature, irrigation, nutrients, and other important environmental parameters.
• Field location, season, plot design, blocking, management practices, and environmental conditions for field studies.
• Appropriate permits, biosafety requirements, or legal information for regulated or collected biological materials.

Statistical and quantitative assessment

• Is the sample size clear, and is the meaning of n defined?
• Are biological and technical replicates distinguished correctly?
• Are statistical tests appropriate to the design and data distribution?
• Are repeated measures, blocking, nesting, multiple comparisons, and batch effects handled appropriately when relevant?
• Are error bars, confidence intervals, and significance indicators defined?
• Do figures and tables provide enough information to assess variability and effect size?
• Is there evidence of pseudoreplication or selective exclusion that could invalidate conclusions?

Data availability and reproducibility

Reviewers should consider whether the evidence necessary to support the conclusions is available in the manuscript, supplementary material, or an appropriate public repository.

• Check accession numbers for sequencing, transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic, or other repository-based datasets when central to the work.
• Identify missing source data that are necessary to evaluate a key claim.
• Consider whether custom code, scripts, pipelines, or models should be made available for reproducibility.
• Do not request unnecessary data that are unrelated to the manuscript's claims.

Bioinformatics, machine learning and multi-omics studies

• Are dataset selection, preprocessing, filtering, normalization, and quality-control steps transparent?
• Are reference genomes, annotations, databases, software versions, and important parameters reported?
• Are differential analyses and false-discovery-rate procedures appropriate?
• For machine learning, are training, validation, and test sets separated appropriately and is data leakage avoided?
• Are performance claims supported by appropriate metrics and independent validation where feasible?
• Are public datasets clearly distinguished from newly generated data?

Assess clarity and scientific authenticity

Figures should accurately represent the underlying data and support the conclusions. Reviewers should alert the editor confidentially when there are credible concerns such as duplicated regions, unexplained repeated images, inconsistent backgrounds, inappropriate splicing, manipulated blots, mislabeled panels, or reuse of the same image to represent different experiments.

Reviewers should not make public accusations or contact authors directly. The editor may request original images or source data when further assessment is warranted.

Research ethics, permits and biosafety

Reviewers should flag missing or unclear statements involving:

Report integrity concerns confidentially to the editor

Potential concerns may include:

Reviewers should describe the concern and supporting evidence without presenting unverified suspicion as established misconduct.

Evaluate scholarship without coercive citation

Reviewers may identify important missing literature when it is genuinely necessary to support, correct, or contextualize the manuscript. Citation requests should be academically justified.

Reviewers must not ask authors to add citations primarily to increase citations to themselves, colleagues, a particular journal, or a preferred research group. Excessive or irrelevant citation requests should be avoided.

Focus on scientific communication

Reviewers should comment when language or organization prevents scientific evaluation, but they are not expected to act as copyeditors. Minor grammar and style corrections may be noted selectively rather than listing every linguistic error.

Comments on language must be professional and should never make derogatory remarks about an author's nationality, native language, institution, or background.

Recommended structure of a PSH review

Make major concerns specific and actionable

A strong major comment should generally explain:

• What the concern is.
• Why it matters scientifically.
• Which conclusion, experiment, analysis, or section it affects.
• What clarification, reanalysis, additional evidence, textual revision, or limitation statement could reasonably address it.

Request only experiments needed to support central claims

Reviewers may request additional experiments when a central conclusion is inadequately supported and the requested work is reasonably necessary to evaluate or validate that conclusion.

Reviewers should avoid expanding the manuscript into a substantially different research project, requesting experiments merely because they would be interesting, or imposing their own preferred research direction when the current study can be evaluated on its stated objectives.

Keep minor comments proportionate

Minor comments should address specific improvements that do not fundamentally change the scientific conclusions, such as unclear wording, inconsistent terminology, missing definitions, figure labels, small reference issues, minor methodological details, or localized presentation problems.

Be respectful, clear and evidence-based

• Critique the work, not the authors.
• Acknowledge strengths where relevant.
• Separate essential revisions from optional suggestions.
• Avoid sarcasm, hostility, dismissive language, insults, or speculation about author motives.
• Do not tell authors directly that the paper is accepted or rejected; the editor makes the decision.
• Ensure comments to authors are consistent with the recommendation submitted to the editor.

Use confidential comments for matters that genuinely require editorial handling

Appropriate confidential comments may include:

• Suspected plagiarism, fabrication, image manipulation, reviewer-identity concerns, or other integrity issues.
• A conflict of interest discovered after accepting the review.
• Limits on the reviewer's expertise that affect confidence in evaluating a specific component.
• Sensitive legal, ethical, or confidentiality concerns that should not be stated as unverified accusations to the authors.

Scientific criticisms that authors need in order to revise the manuscript should normally appear in the comments to authors rather than being hidden only in confidential comments.

Reviewer recommendations

The recommendation should match the written report

A recommendation of rejection should be supported by clearly described major problems, while a recommendation of minor revision should not be accompanied by demands for extensive new experiments or fundamental reanalysis. Editors may interpret inconsistent recommendations according to the substance of the written review.

Complete the review within the invitation deadline

The review invitation or OJS workflow specifies the requested review deadline. Reviewers should accept only when they can reasonably meet that deadline.

If additional time is needed, reviewers should contact the editorial office as early as possible rather than allowing the review to become substantially overdue. Reviewers who become unavailable should notify the editor promptly so another reviewer can be invited.

Reviewing a revised manuscript

When invited to re-review, focus on:

• Whether the authors addressed the original major concerns adequately.
• Whether revisions introduced new problems or unsupported claims.
• Whether remaining issues are essential to validity or are optional improvements.
• Whether additional new requests are truly necessary rather than expanding the review indefinitely.

Do not delegate a review without editor approval

Review invitations are personal. A reviewer should not ask a student, postdoctoral researcher, colleague, or other person to review the manuscript without prior permission from the editor.

When supervised co-review is approved, all participants must follow the same confidentiality and conflict-of-interest requirements, and the contributing co-reviewer's role should be disclosed to the journal so appropriate credit can be considered.

Use your own verified identity

Reviewers must not impersonate another researcher, use a false identity, submit a review through an unauthorized third party, or provide fabricated contact information. The journal may verify identity, institutional affiliation, ORCID, publication record, or professional email details when necessary to protect the integrity of peer review.

Confidentiality continues after review

Reviewers must continue to protect unpublished manuscript information after submitting the report and after receiving the journal's decision. The reviewer should not publicly reveal review participation, author identity, unpublished findings, or editorial correspondence unless the journal and relevant parties explicitly authorize disclosure.

Recognition of reviewer service

PSH may acknowledge reviewer service through reviewer certificates, annual acknowledgments, or other journal-recognition mechanisms where available. Recognition should not reveal which manuscript a reviewer assessed under the double-blind review model.

Consistent high-quality reviewing may be considered when the journal identifies potential future editorial contributors, but reviewer activity alone does not guarantee appointment to the Editorial Board.

Characteristics of a high-quality review

Before submitting your report, confirm that

Guidance informing PSH reviewer expectations

PSH reviewer expectations are informed by recognized principles of responsible peer review, including relevant guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), particularly with respect to confidentiality, conflicts of interest, reviewer conduct, peer-review integrity, and responsible handling of unpublished material.

Reference to external ethical guidance does not imply membership, certification, accreditation, or endorsement unless such status is separately confirmed.

Peer review is a scientific and ethical responsibility

Reviewers for Plant Science Horizons are expected to combine subject expertise with fairness, confidentiality, independence, evidence-based criticism, professional communication, and respect for the integrity of unpublished research. The strongest reviews help editors make sound decisions while helping authors strengthen valid scientific work.