AdP – Peer-review Guidelines

Submitting the text

Before submitting the text the author must complete and sign a PRELIMINARY STATEMENT acknowledging that it is ORIGINAL, and that it has not been submitted for publication to any other publisher.
Once the text is submitted, it will be distributed to TWO external readers.
Reviewers are anonymous; their identity is never revealed to the authors and is known only to the Editorial Staff.

Review Guidelines

The review process involves a grid of evaluation that helps reviewers to explain and more clearly articulate their concerns and comments. Reviewers are free to answer or to ignore the questions or proposed criteria, at their own discretion: none are compulsory apart from citation of the title of the article, the reviewer’s name (which will be removed upon disclosure of the report to the author), along with a final assessment of the work. For each of the questions it is also possible to provide comments in point form. Since the reviewer’s area of expertise is likely to be known to the author, especially in case of refusal to publish, no derogatory remarks are permitted in the report. Reviewers will be asked to consider the following:

1. What is the central topic of the proposed contribution. Is it of any interest?
2. Does the central thesis relate effectively to the author’s proposed topic? How could the scholar improve the focus of the thesis?
3. Does the submission represent research of international standing; what is the extent of the originality and scientific interest of the chosen topic; what new evidence is presented.
4. Clarity of the paper’s verbal style and exposition. Is the topic coherently argued? Quality and range of the sources cited, and of the musical analysis.
5. Quality of the bibliography and citations.
6. Personal comments.
7. Conclusions.

Conflicting reviews

If reviewers’ comments and reports diverge substantially, the editors will send the article to a third reviewer.

Notifying reviewers of decisions

After reviewers’ comments have been considered, authors will be contacted as quickly as possible and, on acceptance of the text for publication, be supplied with the MCN Series’s Editorial Guidelines. Editors will always inform authors of the comments and concerns of reviewers, along with the final decision, according to the following four-point scheme:
1. approval
2. approval with minor revisions
3. approval with major revisions
4. rejection