Review Process and Criteria

Pre-Submission

The Author Guidelines can be found here.

Review

All submitted manuscripts undergo an initial screening by the editorial office to assess their fit with the journal’s aims and scope, compliance with the Author Guidelines, and adherence to ethical and quality standards. Manuscripts that do not meet these requirements may be rejected without external review.

Manuscripts passing the initial screening are assigned to an editor and undergo double-blind peer review by at least two independent reviewers with relevant expertise. Reviewers and authors remain anonymous throughout the review process.

Editors and editorial board members may submit manuscripts to the journal; however, they are excluded from all editorial and review decisions concerning their own submissions. In such cases, the manuscript is handled by an independent editor, and external reviewers are selected to ensure an impartial evaluation. All participants in the review process are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest.

Based on the reviewers’ reports, the handling editor makes one of the following decisions: accept, revisions required, resubmit for review, or decline. Authors receiving revision requests are invited to submit a revised manuscript together with a response explaining how reviewer comments have been addressed.

Revised manuscripts may be returned to the original reviewers for further evaluation when necessary. The final publication decision is made by the responsible editor based on the reviewers’ recommendations and the quality of the revised manuscript.

Accepted manuscripts undergo copyediting, proofreading, and final technical checks before publication.

Review Criteria

When evaluating the manuscript, we ask reviewers to provide feedback on the following points:

(1) The relevance of the contribution to the field of VET,

(2) the appropriateness of the methods used to answer the research question,

(3) the coherence and comprehensibility of the argumentation,

(4) the appropriateness of the content as well as the critical discussion of the literature presented in the paper,

(5) the discussion of limitations of the study, and, finally,

(6) the suitability of the article for an international readership.