Peer-review process

An assistant editor conducts the initial assessment of the articles submitted to “Actual problems of preventive medicine” for compliance with formal requirements. The article must meet the design requirements and publication policy. Articles that do not meet the current requirements are rejected.

At the next stage, the article is reviewed by a reviewer. The peer review process is confidential and anonymous (conditions of receipt, content, features and review stages, reviewers’ comments and the final decision on publication are not disclosed to anyone but authors and reviewers).

The reviewer assesses the sufficiency of disclosing the relevance of the article’s topic; substantiation of the connection of the problem concerned with important scientific or practical tasks; completeness of the analysis of the recent researches and publications on the general problem; justification of the obtained research findings; scientific conclusions and their compliance with the article purpose; prospects for further research. The reviewer also assesses the author’s awareness of the relevant scientific literature, features of language and style of the article (clarity of language and style, the need for additional scientific and literary editing, etc.).

The review should contain specific conclusions on the article’s publication with the specification of the main shortcomings (if any). The reviewer draws one of the following conclusions:
- recommended for publishing in the author’s variant;
- recommended for publishing after improving, given reviewer’s comments;
- rejected.

Subject to a positive review, the reviewer informs the editorial board, which makes the final decision. The article approved for publication is polished by technical and literary editors. Editors reserve the right to make minor stylistic, spelling, and technical alterations that do not affect the article content without the author’s consent.

The author is informed about the review results and editorial board opinion via e-mail. If the reviewer indicates the need to amend the article, the executive secretary sends it to the author with a proposal to keep in mind comments when preparing an updated version of the article or reasonably refute them in case of disagreement.