Guidelines for reviewers

1. Invitation to Review

Manuscripts submitted to Cartography and Geoinformation journal are reviewed by at least two experts. The reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and provide a recommendation to the editor on whether the manuscript should be accepted, requires revision, or should be rejected.

We ask invited reviewers to do the following:

• Accept or decline any invitations at their earliest convenience
• Suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must be declined
• Promptly request a deadline extension if more time is required to provide a comprehensive report.

2. Potential Conflicts of Interest

We ask reviewers to declare any potential conflicts of interest and email the journal’s Editorial Office if they are unsure if something constitutes a potential conflict of interest. Possible conflicts of interest include the following:

• The reviewer works at the same institute as one of the authors
• The reviewer has been a co-author, collaborator, or joint grant holder or has had any other academic link with any of the authors within the past three years
• The reviewer has a close personal relationship with, rivalry with, or antipathy to any of the authors
• The reviewer may financially gain or lose from the publication of the paper in any way
• The reviewer has any other non-financial conflicts of interest (political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, intellectual, or commercial) with any of the authors.

Reviewers should disclose any conflicts of interest that may be perceived as bias for or against the paper or authors.

Please kindly note that if reviewers are asked to assess a manuscript they previously reviewed for another journal, as this is not considered a conflict of interest. In this case, reviewers should feel free to let the Editorial Office know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

Reviewers are also advised to read the relevant descriptions in the Ethical Guidelines For Peer Reviewers from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

3. Declaration of Confidentiality

Cartography and Geoinformation journal operate double-blind peer review. Until an article is published, the reviewers should keep the content of the manuscript, including the abstract, confidential. The reviewers should also be careful to not reveal their identity to the authors, either in their comments or in metadata.

4. Review Reports

Review reports must be written in English or Croatian. We list some general instructions regarding review reports below.

To begin with, please consider the following guidelines:

• Reviewers should read the whole article as well as the Supplementary Materials, if applicable, paying close attention to the figures, tables, data, and methods.
• Reviewers should critically analyze the article as a whole, in addition to specific sections and the key concepts presented.
• Comments should be detailed so that the authors may correctly understand and address the points raised.
• Reviewers must not recommend excessive citations of their work (self-citations), another author’s work (honorary citations), or articles from the journal to which the manuscript was submitted as a means of increasing the number of citations of the reviewer/author/journal. References can be provided as needed, but they must clearly improve the quality of the manuscript under review.
• Reviewers should maintain a neutral tone and focus on providing constructive criticism that will help the authors improve their manuscript. Derogatory comments will not be tolerated.

• GenAI tools and other large language models (LLMs) should not be used by reviewers in the preparation of review reports. Reviewers are solely responsible for the content of their reports, and the utilization of these tools may violate confidentiality, proprietary, and data privacy rights. Limited use to improve the written quality of a peer-review report, such as correcting grammar, structure, spelling, punctuation and formatting, may be acceptable but should be disclosed upon the submission of the peer-review report. Under no circumstances should reviewers upload manuscripts, either in whole or in part, images, figures, tables or any kind of communication related to unpublished manuscripts to any GenAI tools. If it is determined that AI tools have been inappropriately used in the preparation of a review report, the report will be discarded.

Review reports should contain the following:

• A brief summary (one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper, its main contributions.
• Comments regarding general concepts
• Articles: Comments highlighting areas of weakness, the testability of the hypothesis, methodological inaccuracies, missing controls, etc.
• Reviews: Comments on the completeness of the topic covered, its relevance, the identified gap in knowledge, the appropriateness of references, etc.
  These comments should be focused on the scientific content of the manuscript and should be specific enough for the authors to suitably respond.
• Specific comments referring to line numbers, tables or figures that disclose inaccuracies within the text, or sentences that are unclear. These comments should focus on the scientific content.

Below are general questions to help guide the writing of review reports for research articles:

• Is the manuscript clear, relevant to the field, and presented in a well-structured manner?
• Are most of the cited references recently published (within the last 5 years) and relevant? Does the manuscript include an excessive number of self-citations?
• Is the manuscript scientifically sound, and is the experimental design appropriate to test the hypothesis?
• Are the manuscript’s results reproducible?
• Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate? Do they properly present the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand? Are the data interpreted appropriately and consistently throughout the manuscript? (Please include details regarding the statistical analysis or data acquired from specific databases.)
• Are the conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented?
• Are the ethics and data availability statements adequate?

Below are general questions to help guide the writing of review reports for review articles:

• Is the review paper clear, comprehensive, and relevant to the field? Are there any gaps in knowledge?
• Has a similar review been published recently and, if yes, is the current review still relevant and of interest to the scientific community?
• Are most of the cited references recently published (within the last 5 years) and relevant? Are any relevant citations omitted? Does the manuscript include an excessive number of self-citations?
• Are the statements and conclusions drawn coherent and supported by the listed citations?
• Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate? Do they properly present the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand?

5. Rating Manuscripts

During the manuscript evaluation, please rate the following aspects:

• Novelty: Is the research question original and well defined? Do the results advance the current knowledge?
• Scope: Does the manuscript fit the journal’s scope*?
• Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses carefully identified?
• Quality: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented effectively? Are the highest standards used for the presentation of the results?
• Scientific Soundness: Is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed according to the highest technical standards? Are the data robust enough to draw conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow other researchers to reproduce the results? Are the raw data available and correct (where applicable)?
• Interest to Readers: Will the conclusions engage the journal’s readers? Will the paper attract a wide readership or be of interest only to a limited number of people?
• Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this research? Does the manuscript advance the current knowledge? Do the authors address a significant long-standing question with innovative experiments? Do the authors present a negative result for a valid scientific hypothesis?
• English Level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?
• Croatian Level: Is the Croatian language appropriate and understandable?

Manuscripts submitted to Cartography and Geoinformation journal should meet the highest standards of publication ethics:

• Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.
• Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse text from another source without appropriate citation.
• The studies reported should have been carried out in accordance with widely accepted ethical research standards.

If a reviewer becomes aware of any scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism, or any other unethical behavior related to the manuscript, they should immediately raise these concerns with the Managing Editor.

6. Overall Recommendation

Please provide an overall recommendation regarding the manuscript as follows:

• Accept in Present Form: The manuscript can be accepted without any further changes.
• Accept after Minor Revision: In principle, the manuscript will be accepted after the authors revise based on the reviewers’ comments. Authors are given five days for minor revision.
• Reconsider after Major Revision: The acceptance of the manuscript will depend on the revision. The authors will need to provide a point-by-point response or rebuttal if some revisions regarding the reviewer’s comments cannot be made. A maximum of two rounds of major revision per manuscript is normally permitted. The authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within ten days, and the revised version will be returned to the reviewers for further comments.
• Reject: The manuscript has serious flaws or makes no original contribution and should be rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.