For authors
As grassroots journal we assess articles that are already published, either in traditional journals or by preprint servers/repositories. So you do not have to submit articles to us.
If you just published an article and would like it to be assessed, you can alert us to it in the comments of the page on new articles.
For reviewers
Everyone is invited to submit assessments of published articles and manuscripts. This can be a full assessment grading the study or a quick comment on a detail and everything in between. For the assessments it is recommended to use Hypothesis, which makes writing detailed comments a lot more efficient; just select the text you want to comment on and add your comment.
Assessments can be added to any article in the journal, but especially assessments for the articles listed as under review are appreciated. If you would like to write a full assessment for an article not yet included, please contact the editors. That is an argument to include the study.
Comments can be anything that is useful for the reader, it does not have to be critique, but could also point to additional/newer information, provide context or more detail, start a discussion on future research on the topic or ask a question. Also the authors of the study themselves are welcome to add clarifications and corrections. The only limit is the quality of the comment.
Assessments will only be published after review by the editors (pre-moderation) to ensure that the comments are valuable for the scientific discussion and professional. That the editors take responsibility for the quality of the debate has the advantage that anonymous and pseudonymous comments can be allowed. However, in case of full graded assessments it is important for the editor to judge the expertise of the reviewer. They can be published anonymously, but please inform the editor of your identity.
Full graded assessment
The studies are graded on five factors. The first three are mandatory, the last two are only used if applicable.
- Impact on the larger scientific community (climatology and beyond).
- Traditional journals only publish articles they deem sufficiently important. As a grassroots journal the Homogenisation Journal publishes all articles that are technically correct and assess their impact on a scale of 1 to 100.
10 is technically correct.
20 is the threshold to journals that cannot afford to be too selective.
50 is the threshold to a high quality “international” climate journal.
80 is the threshold to a general science publication such as Science and Nature.
90 is the threshold to a likely Nobel price.
- Contribution to homogenisation science.
- This factor assess the contribution of the study to our understanding of homogenisation on a percentile scale from 1 to 100. Please try to use the full scale; an average paper is already really good, half are worse.
- The technical quality of the paper.
- It is possible that a paper did not find anything new, but did contribute to our confidence in our understanding by being very vigorous, dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. Such a paper would still score high for technical quality. This factor also judges whether a paper is well written and whether the code and data have been published to help others doing similar work. Assessed on a percentile scale relative to the technical quality of other papers.
- Importance at the time of publishing.
- Only applicable for older papers. A review paper may have been important at the time, but superseded by newer ones. A homogenisation method may have been state-of-the-art, but no longer so. Such papers should be graded high here, while no longer scores high on “impact” or “contribution”, which readers should be able to use to determine which papers to prioritise. Papers that have turned out to be flawed and have held the field back should not get a good grade even if unfortunately influential at the time.
- Importance of the research program.
- Only applicable if papers are a part of a research program. A paper on the latest version of a homogenisation method may not contribute to the field much by itself, but if the method is important this can be reported here. Assessed on a percentile scale compared to other research programs; where most research programs are likely single papers.
For editors
The editors select the studies to be reviewed and solicit reviews from colleagues with relevant expertise.
At least two named editors are responsible for an article. The editors decide which comments are sufficiently valuable to be published. Once enough full assessments are published the editors write a synthesis together based on these reviews. A synthesis is not a review, but editors are welcome, but not expected to review the article themselves.
Also after writing the synthesis the article remains open for comments and assessments. Editors occasionally revisit old assessments and certify that they are still up to date.