PROCESUL DE RECENZARE A PUBLICA IILOR ACADEMICE: CRITERII DE EVALUARE A MANUSCRISELOR

Is there a uniform set of mechanisms to ensure the quality of scientific papers before publication? What are the most common criteria used to evaluate the quality of academic articles? The aim of this paper is to answer these questions. The paper was divided in two sections, a literature review, and an empirical research on the criteria used by 189 journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index. The findings show that there appears to be little attention paid to the peer review process, given that the majority of the journals do not provide any information on this topic to the public. Moreover, only a small proportion of journals use structured guidelines to help reviewers in evaluating manuscripts. It was also observed that these checklists use both scientific evaluation criteria and criteria relating to ethics. The most used criteria are related to the originality of the paper, the quality of methodology and the quality of literature review. The conclusion is that there is no consistent method for assessing the quality of the manuscripts. However, due to the limited availability of data, we are cautious when stating this.