Italus Hortus operates a single-blind peer review process. The selected manuscripts are sent to a minimum of two reviewers for assessing their scientific quality. Reviewers are asked to return their comments and suggestions within 3 weeks.
Before accepting or declining to review any manuscript, please consider these very simple aspects:
The manuscript falls within your area of expertise. If this is not the case, please provide suggestions for alternative reviewers.
Conflict of interest. If you feel you might have a potential conflict of interest please communicate this to the editor when you respond.
You have enough time. We know it is always difficult to find additional time for review work and we highly appreciate this. But if you are sure you will not meet the editorial deadline consider to decline the review request by quickly respond by email to the invitation, avoiding to slow down the editorial process.
Upon accepting the review work, you will receive the manuscript file and the reviewer form to be filled in all its parts. At the end of the reviewer form, the reviewer is asked to provide his/her comments about the evaluated manuscript to the editor and to the authors. In filling these sections, please consider to follow these guidelines.
Comments for the editors:
Provide a short summary of the article, outlining the area of research where the manuscript falls.
Provide your overall impression about the article, focusing on novelty and interest of the evaluated work with specific reference to selected fields of horticulture.
Provide a clear statement about the adequacy of the research methods followed by authors in conducting the experiment/s
.Clearly point out possible important flaws in the research work that need to be solved before considering the article for publication.
Comments for authors:
Provide comments that are strictly factual and supported by evidences. Full explanation of your (negative) comments should be given to the authors so that they can eventually find appropriate solutions to be included in the new version of the article.
When referring to changes in tables and/or figures, please provide the authors with full explanation of the required modifications and also with the possible ways to implement them correctly.
Always refer to line numbers when focusing on issues related to English grammar, spelling or layout of the article (as an alternative you can make the corrections directly in the full paper text and return the file together with your reviewer form).