All types of contributed articles as well as reviews are peer-reviewed in the Soil & Environment. All forms of published corrections may also be peer-reviewed in principle at the discretion of the editors.

Reviewing with access code

We ask reviewers to submit their comments via our secure online system by using the instantly generated “access code”. The reviewers use this code only for reviewing. They submit their comments intended for the author and confidential remarks directed to the editor. Once the review comment has been sent to the editor, the access code is no longer valid. If the reviewers would like to refer to their reviewed contents on manuscripts, they can confer with the editorial office.

Criteria for publication

We are currently receiving many more submissions than we can publish. Therefore, we ask reviewers and editors to be more critical to the given manuscript. To avoid accumulation of manuscripts to-be-published and the subsequent delay of publication of valuable findings, the number of the incorporated articles has been gradually increased, with the acceptance rate decreasing during the last three years. To be published in SE, a manuscript should meet our general criteria: It must provide strong evidence for its conclusions. It must be of novelty and significance to the related fields.

The review process

All submitted manuscripts are read by the editorial staff and we are following the double blind review process. To save time for authors and peer reviewers, only those papers deemed by most of our editors to not meet our criteria in terms of scientific merit as well as overall styles are rejected promptly without review. These decisions are also based on informal advice from specialists in the field. Manuscripts judged to be of potential interest to our audience are sent for formal review, typically to two reviewers. The editors then make the first decision based on the reviewers’ comments as follows: Accept, with or without editorial revisions; Request the authors to revise their manuscript to address specific concerns before final decision is made; Reject.

Evaluation category

In addition to the review comment, we provide evaluation categories so that the reviewers can answer the specific questions on the manuscript, which is helpful to the editorial staffs for further processing. The evaluation category includes the following:

• Scientific quality : high, good, acceptable, poor
• Significance of research : high, good, acceptable, poor
• Priority : high, acceptable, low
• Style : clear and concise, acceptable, low
• Length : appropriate, acceptable, too long, too short
• English writing : appropriate, acceptable, poor (proofreading required)