Thank you for serving the coatings community as a peer reviewer. Your assessments safeguard rigor, foster innovation, and help authors present their work with precision and integrity. This guide outlines our expectations and provides a structured checklist to support consistent, fair, and timely reviews.
Core Principles
- Confidentiality: all materials and discussions remain strictly confidential.
- Impartiality: disclose conflicts and decline if any relationship could bias your judgment.
- Constructiveness: focus on evidence, clarity, and replicability; avoid personal remarks.
- Timeliness: accept only if you can return a review by the agreed deadline; request extensions early.
Technical Evaluation Checklist
- Novelty and significance: Does the work materially advance coating science or application?
- Problem framing: Is the question clear, motivated by literature, and relevant to practice?
- Experimental design: Are deposition/curing parameters, substrates, and controls adequately described?
- Characterization depth: Are methods appropriate, calibrated, and interpreted with standards/controls?
- Data integrity: Are images and spectra unambiguously labeled with magnification/scale, regions of interest, and baseline corrections?
- Statistics and uncertainty: Are sample sizes, replicates, error bars, and confidence intervals reported?
- Mechanistic insight: Are structure–property–process links supported by evidence (e.g., cross-sectional analysis, XPS, EBSD)?
- Benchmarking: Are results compared to state-of-the-art or relevant industrial specifications?
- Reproducibility: Are enough details provided for reproduction? Is data/code availability addressed?
Ethics & Compliance
- Authorship: contributions align with accepted criteria; acknowledgments properly capture assistance.
- Conflicts of interest: funding sources, affiliations, and potential competing interests are disclosed.
- Human/animal/cell line use: where applicable, approvals and consent are stated; hazards and waste are addressed.
- Image integrity: no inappropriate contrast manipulation, cloning, or selective reporting.
Writing the Review
Please structure your report with clear sections:
- Summary: one paragraph in your own words describing the contribution and key findings.
- Major comments: numbered points addressing validity, completeness, and significance (each with actionable fixes).
- Minor comments: clarity, grammar, figure readability, unit consistency, reference completeness.
- Recommendation: choose one (accept / minor revision / major revision / reject) with a concise rationale.
When to Recommend Major Revision or Rejection
- Insufficient methodological detail to reproduce results or evaluate reliability.
- Inadequate controls or comparisons that preclude meaningful conclusions.
- Questionable data integrity, unaddressed artifacts, or irreconcilable contradictions.
- Claims of application readiness without realistic performance, durability, or stability evidence.
Recognizing Excellence
- Transparent methodology with released data/processing scripts or full parameter tables.
- Robust validation (multiple substrates/environments) and honest limitation statements.
- Clear industrial relevance (e.g., corrosion hours to failure, wear rate reduction, thermal shock cycles).
- Compelling visuals (cross-sections, EDS maps, operando sequences) with complete metadata.
Reviewer Conduct & Support
If you suspect plagiarism, image manipulation, or undisclosed conflicts, alert the handling editor in confidence. We welcome co-review with an early‑career researcher provided you inform us and ensure confidentiality. Reviewers who consistently provide thorough, timely feedback will be considered for the Editorial Board.
For a detailed overview of the Journal of Coating Technology & Innovation scope, please visit the Scope Spotlight blog.