Thank you for agreeing to review the paper for the journal Life and School. The Life and School editorial board highly appreciate the help of all experts who voluntarily participate in the review process. Once you have submitted reviews, you will receive an email notifying you that the review has been created, which allows you to index the reviews. Besides, once a year, the journal Life and School publishes a list of all reviewers on its website. 

We hope you find these guidelines useful during the review process. If you have additional questions, the editorial board members of the journal Life and School are at your disposal.

General guidelines

The reviewer should provide an impartial, constructive report on the scientific/professional aspects of the manuscript within the agreed timeframe, avoiding personal comments or criticism. Review reports have to be written in the language in which the manuscript has been submitted.

The reviewer is responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of the review process. Sharing, discussing with other people, or disclosing information from a reviewed manuscript is unacceptable. All material submitted for review should be treated as confidential.

If the reviewer does not have adequate expertise for all aspects of the manuscript, this should be emphasized in the report. It is anticipated that a reviewer cannot be an expert in all areas so limiting the review to a particular area of expertise is more than acceptable.

Before accepting an invitation to review a manuscript, potential reviewers should notify the editor-in-chief of possible conflicts of interest.

Initial manuscript evaluation

All manuscripts have to be initially sent to the journal's editorial board to assess the fulfillment of technical requirements. Manuscripts not edited following the Guidelines for Authors will not be forwarded for further review. Manuscripts that are incomplete or inappropriate for technical reasons have to be returned to the authors for revision. The next evaluation phase is a methodological review. Methodological reviewers decide whether the paper is suitable for further review, whether it requires additional changes before submitting to reviewers, or whether it is not suitable for publication in the journal. The manuscript is then forwarded to associates for further review.

Reviewers' assessments

All papers are reviewed anonymously by at least two independent reviewers. If the reviewer cannot meet the deadline for completion of the review, there is a possibility of not accepting the offered review task. The usual time to write a review in the journal Life and School is four weeks. If the reviewer should not submit the report within the deadline and after the reminder, the editor will find a new reviewer with a shorter deadline to evaluate the manuscript. If two reviewers provide conflicting reports, the expert opinion of a third reviewer will be required.

In addition to the paper itself, each reviewer also receives a review form by e-mail. The first part of the review consists of a general evaluation of the submitted manuscript. According to the given criteria in the table of the review form, reviewers should evaluate the different parts of the paper as well as the paper as a whole, which will help them in making a final decision on the paper.

In the second part of the review form, reviewers should decide if the submitted paper is suitable for publication in the journal Life and School.

When making a recommendation for publication, reviewers should consider the following:

1. Is the topic of the paper appropriate for the journal Life and School?
2. Does the paper have a significant scientific/professional contribution?
3. Can deficiencies be corrected by a performance audit?

In the third part of the review form, reviewers decide on the categorization of the submitted work according to the following criteria:

1. Original research paper (contains hitherto unpublished results of scientific research)
2. Preliminary communication (contains new results of scientific research, but without sufficient details to allow verification as in the original research paper, and it is useful for the results to be published quickly)
3. Review paper (contains an original, concise and critical review of an area in which the author himself participates and which contributes to the already published papers)
4. Professional paper (contains useful contributions from the profession and to the profession, and does not have to represent the original research).

In the last, fourth part of the reviewer's form, the reviewer attaches a descriptive report in the form of comments, suggestions, and guidelines to the author. The review should include an assessment of all aspects of the manuscript, in particular the appropriateness of the research method, the accuracy of the results, and the correlation between the conclusions and the results. The reviewer should identify good aspects of the research and provide constructive feedback that will help the author correct deficiencies in the manuscript.

The following guidelines may be helpful for this purpose, and it would be desirable for the reviewer to include them in the descriptive report:

• title (appropriate and concise)
• abstract (describes well the content of the paper or objectives, methodology, findings, and conclusions)
• conceptual and theoretical framework (sufficiently comprehensive reference to relevant and contemporary literature, theoretical foundation of the paper, and a satisfactory overview of existing knowledge)
• aims and hypotheses (clearly indicated purpose or aim of the paper, clearly formulated and grounded hypotheses in the paper)
• method (clear and sufficiently informative presentation of the methodology, the sampling procedure has been described in detail, the instruments have been listed appropriately)
• results (data analysis is appropriate given the stated objectives and nature of the data)
• all tables, figures, and graphs are necessary and appropriate (and following the journal’s guidelines)
• discussion and conclusions (harmonized with research results and previous text)
• relevance of the literature
• manuscript structure (according to the Guidelines for Authors and APA standards)
• the social relevance of the topic
• scientific/professional contribution (clearly explained in the paper).

Revised manuscripts have to be returned to reviewers who may request a new revision of the manuscript.

The final decision regarding the acceptance or rejection of papers is made by the editor. Based upon the received reviews and the reviewers’ recommendations, the editor makes one of the following decisions regarding the manuscript: A - acceptance, B - acceptance with revisions, C - rejection with a proposal to make major revisions to the paper, and then to resubmit it, or D - rejection.