About the article evaluation process
Preliminary Assessment (desk review)
Articles submitted to Educação em Foco undergo a preliminary evaluation (desk review) by the Editorial Board in order to verify if the manuscripts meet the following requirements:
- Adequacy to the editorial line, the scope of the Journal and the indicated Section.
- Observance of the norms for title, abstract, and keywords.
- Rigor in writing through syntactic, grammatical and orthographic correctness.
- Adequacy of the text to the respective Template.
- Observance of the two-year interstice period for publication of articles of the same authorship (author or co-author).
- Compliance with the requirement of a minimum doctoral degree for one of the authors of the submission.
In case of disagreement with these requirements, the article is rejected and the author is notified through the System, being able to make the necessary corrections and resubmit the manuscript.
In the last phase of the preliminary evaluation, all texts are inspected using Turnitin's iThenticate text comparison software and the DOCxWEB anti-plagiarism program.
The characterization of plagiarism results in the rejection of the submission and immediate communication to the author, who will not be able to resubmit the submission.
Peer Review (Double blind peer review)
If accepted in the preliminary evaluation, the article is evaluated in a "double blind peer review" system by ad hocreviewers (from institutions and regions different from the authors'), indicated by the Editors-in-Chief, who will be guided by an evaluation form.
The deadline for return of the reviewers is, at most, two weeks after the confirmation of the acceptance of the review by the ad hoc reviewer.
In case they do not confirm their availability to evaluate it within one week, the collaboration is waived and the article is forwarded to another ad hoc reviewer.
In the double blind review, the identities of the reviewers and the authors are concealed from both parties. Thus, it is essential that the manuscript has no authorship identification included in the body of the text, footnotes, references, or file properties. In citations and references of works by the authors themselves, only (AUTHOR1, year) should be used, without presenting title or other information about the publication, to preserve anonymity.
The evaluators will take the following criteria into consideration:
- Adequacy of the title, abstract and keywords to the content;
- Clarification of the theme and definition of the objectives;
- Quality of the approach and of the bibliography used;
- Coherent articulation of ideas;
- Argumentation based on empirical or bibliographical data;
- Quality of the conclusion and contributions to the field of education.
The results of the evaluations can be: accept, accept with modifications, and reject.
a) Accept: the evaluator may, at their discretion, make comments on the text or not.
b) Accept with changes: the evaluators should point out the recommended changes, with notes in the proper field of the evaluation form or in the body of the article.
c) Reject: the evaluators should point out the reasons that led to the rejection of the article, and may present suggestions for improvement, aiming at future submissions.
In case of discrepancy in the evaluation of the same article, it is sent to a third evaluator, so that a conclusive opinion may be issued.
When accepted with changes, the author must identify the changes in the text, and justify what was not attended. It should be noted that changes made to the text do not guarantee its automatic approval. In this case, the text will not be returned to the evaluators, and after a detailed analysis of the changes made in light of the evaluations, the Editorial Board will decide whether to accept or reject the submitted article.
Rejected articles, containing comments from the evaluators, are sent to the authors, accompanied by the respective evaluations, without the identification of the evaluators.
The Editors reserve the right to reject articles submitted after the established deadline and those whose authors disagree with the evaluation and whose opinions are maintained by the editors.
After approval, the article moves on to the production phase, comprised of the proofreading (norms and language) and layout stages.
The revision of the standards and of the Portuguese language, as well as the translation of the abstracts, is of full responsibility of the authors. The Abstract and the Resumen must be revised by a specialist in the language and proven by means of a declaration signed by the reviser and submitted as a supplementary document, after the acceptance of the publication, in the process of sending the final version.
The journal has a team of reviewers who make a final evaluation of the manuscript. Thus, the approved articles may undergo minor editorial revisions to facilitate their clarity and understanding, without altering, however, their content. If the text requires too many changes, the Team will recommend that the article be returned to the authors for the necessary adjustments.
The publication of the manuscript is subject to the number of articles in the evaluation process and the criteria of regional and institutional diversity.
In this journal, the average time for manuscript evaluation has been twelve months. From approval to publication, the average has been up to seven months.
After publication, it is essential that the authors collaborate in the dissemination of the article, and of the journal, among their peers, in the community and in social networks.
The journal reserves the right not to evaluate articles:
- Submitted, concurrently, to other journals.
- Of the same authorship, within a period of less than two years from the last publication.
- Of the same authorship (author or co-author), submitted simultaneously.
- From authors of the University of the State of Minas Gerais (UEMG) in a percentage higher than 20% of the articles published annually.
Conflicts of Interest
In order to ensure the journal's ethical posture and credibility, Educação em Foco requires that authors, evaluators, reviewers or editors inform about potential conflicts of interest, whether they are of personal, commercial, political, academic or financial nature.
Authors are required to inform the Editors of the journal and to acknowledge, in the article itself, the potential conflict of interest, showing the procedures adopted to minimize possible biases in their research.
As for the reviewers, all must report to the editors any conflicts of interest that could influence their task of evaluating the manuscript, and, if necessary, declare themselves unqualified to review it.
Editors should not make any editorial decisions or monitor the editorial process of manuscripts submitted to the journal in the event of a Conflict of Interest of any kind. In such a situation, the editor who does not have such a conflict of interest will be fully responsible for the editorial process and publication.
Confidentiality
The Editorial Board must keep all information about the submitted manuscript confidential, sharing it only with those involved in the evaluation and publication.
