Reviewer Guidelines

Transparency

To make quality assurance as transparent as possible, reviews need to be signed by the reviewers and they will be published after each round of peer-review by the journal. They will be permanently linked with the submitted pre-print through a comment on PubPeer. This is regardless of whether the article is accepted, returned for revision, or rejected.

Reviewers can request pseudonymization before they submit their review. That is, pubpeer comments and the published peer review report will not include the reviewers’ name but a pseudonym. The reviewer’s name is known to the handling editor, and the senior editors. Reviewers’ pseudonyms can be made public by R2 upon request by the respective reviewers.

Disclosures

Reviewers are asked to make a recommendation (accept, revise, reject) and to justify their decision. Reviewers are required to review the manuscript and supplemental materials and need to disclose whether they reviewed the preregistration, materials, data, and code. 

Reviewer code of conduct

Reviewers are expected to provide constructive feedback. Personal attacks, coercion to cite their research, or vague criticism may lead to reviewers being blacklisted to review articles for Replication Research. Reviewers must not base their decision on the outcome, that is, acceptance/rejection due to a successful or failed replication is not considered in the editorial board’s decisions.

Reviewers must declare all potential conflicts of interest and explain if and how they are connected to the authors of the original work. Reviewers must declare use of AI (e.g., “Points 2 and 3 are based on the suggestions of ChatGTP 4”).

For reviewers seeking guidance, we recommend PCI Psychology’s guide for reviewers.

Review checklist

• Decision (accept, revise, reject)
• Justification / Comments for the authors
• Review coverage (manuscript, original report, supplemental materials, preregistration, materials, data, code, push-button replicability)

Disclosures:

• I recommend a statistical expert to give feedback on the analyses.
• The Social Responsibility Review should be conducted.
• My comments adhere to the reviewer code of conduct in that they are constructive and targeted at improving the manuscript.
• I have been working together with the author / one of the authors.
• I have been working together with the editor handling this submission.
• In cases where I have suggested the citation of studies that I co-authored, I have disclosed that I am a co-author and justified why this paper and not another one should be cited.

Reproducibility Check

The editorial team, specifically the reproducibility manager, will ensure numerical reproducibility of accepted empirical articles. Authors will receive instructions for how to share data and code after acceptance of their article.