Acta Agraria Debreceniensis (AAD) is a printed and electronic journal which follows the procedure of the collegial peer-reviewing (double-blind review), as every interested party included in the publication should accept the standards regarding the expected moral behaviour. If authors submit a paper and reviewers accept to conduct a review, it is presumed that they know and adhere to publication ethics.

The AAD Ethical Standards are in accordance with the COPE standards, particularly the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

 

Responsibilities of the editors

Received submissions will be considered by the editors to determine whether they fall within the scope of the journal. Appropriate submissions will be sent out for full external review. The submissions not falling within the scope of the journal will be returned to the submitting author quickly so that submission elsewhere will not be delayed.

Editors have the authority over the editorial content and are responsible to manage the peer review process of the manuscripts. The editor-in-chief makes the final decision about the articles to be published.

The editor should evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, origin or political philosophy of the authors.

 

Responsibilities of the peer-reviewers

Peer review assists the responsible editor to make editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the paper.

Any chosen reviewer who feels unqualified to evaluate the manuscript or has conflict of interest about the invitation must inform the editor. If the invited reviewer knows that the prompt review will be impossible, he/she should notify the responsible editor and excuse himself/herself from the review process.

All information regarding the manuscript must be kept confidential. Manuscript must not be shown to or discussed with others.

 

Responsibilities of the authors

The Author(s) must carefully read and then follow the Instructions for Authors of each AAD journal before the submission of the manuscript.

The Author(s) must declare that the submitted manuscript (or any of its part) is currently not being considered for publication elsewhere or has been already published (or, if so, the relevant works must be cited in the manuscript).

The Author(s) must ensure that the manuscript is original, prepared to a high scholarly standard and fully referenced using the prescribed referencing convention.

The Authors must ensure that all the authors participated actively on the manuscript preparation and contributed substantially to study planning, data collection or interpretation of results and wrote or critically revised the manuscript and approved its final submitted version.

The Authors must ensure that all persons listed as authors of the manuscript are aware of and have agreed to be listed and no person who meets the authorship criteria has been omitted.

The Author(s) must ensure that all the Authors participating in the preparation and writing of the manuscript agree to the manuscript publication in the particular AAD journal both online Open Access and the printed version after any amendments arising from the peer review, and that the names of the Authors, their affiliations and email address of the corresponding author will be published together with the article.

The Author(s) must carefully read all the conditions included in the copyright form and to accept the copyright during the submission process.

When submitting the manuscript, the Author(s) should provide at least 3 reviewers, who must be from different institution or country, to avoid any conflict of interest. The contact emails of the provided reviewers should be institutional (not public email addresses such as gmail.com etc.).

The Author(s) must declare any potential conflict of interest at any state during the publication process.

The Author(s) must cooperate with the editors in correction or retraction of the manuscript if necessary. The Author(s) must immediately inform the editors whenever any obvious error in the published manuscript is identified.

The article must always be formatted according to the journal's requirements prior to the first insertion into the system. Should the article fail to comply with the editorial guidelines, it may be rejected by the Editor of the Journal.

 

Review process

The AAD journal review process is a “Double blind” process, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed throughout the review process. The reviewers are assigned by the Editor of the Journal or Associate Editor, however the suggestions for the reviewers may come from the authors (at the time of the manuscript submission they suggest at least three potential reviewers) and also from other assigned reviewers.

The following aspects are considered by our reviewers:

- Is the subject of the article within scope of the journal?

- Does the title clearly and sufficiently reflect its content?

- Are the presentation, organization and length satisfactory?

- Can you suggest additions or amendments (words, phrases or others) that will increase the value of this paper for an international audience?

- Is the quality of the English satisfactory?

- Are the references adequate and are they all necessary?

Possible outcomes of the review: refusal, ask for revision (minor or substantial), approval.

If only minor modifications are asked by the reviewer, the revised version may be accepted.

 

Reviewers’ responsibilities

The Reviewer(s) must only agree to review the manuscripts for which he or she has the subject of expertise required to carry out a proper assessment and which they can assess in a timely manner.

The Reviewer(s) after receiving the invitation to review the manuscript must immediately notify the Editor(s) whenever he or she feels unqualified to review the assigned manuscript or sees difficulties to meet the deadline for the completion of the review.

Reviews written by Editors, Associate Editors and Reviewers must always be written in English and must contain comments on article orientation, originality and scientific/research value, article goal, methodology, achieved results, discussion, references and quality of professional English.

The Reviewer(s) must inform the Editor(s) if there is any possible conflict of interest related to the assigned manuscript.

In case the Reviewer(s) cannot review the manuscript, he or she is asked to suggest another expert from the field of expertise.

The Reviewer(s) must treat the manuscript in a confidential manner and not use any part of the content of the reviewed manuscript for his or her future research as the reviewing manuscript is not published yet.

The main task of the Reviewer(s) is to help improve the quality of the manuscript with the appropriate care and attention, review the manuscript objectively and being constructively critical.

The Reviewer(s) must inform the Editor(s) whenever he or she finds similarities between the reviewed manuscript and another article either published or under consideration to another journal.

To avoid plagiarism, after the submission, the manuscripts will be checked by an international plagiarism search software programme (iThenticate). If the similarity index is too high (above 20%) the manuscript will be immediately rejected. In ethical issues the COPE guidelines are followed (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices).