Reviewers Guidelines
If you are interested in joining the JIS permanent review board, please fill out the registration form.
Guaranteeing a transparent and rigorous process is a priority for JIS. Adding to this priority, JIS is committed to educating and supporting authors, reviewers, and editors toward more rigorous, critical, and ethical practices.
When reviewing a manuscript, you will be asked to declare that you have no conflict of interest with the submitted work or its authors and declare that you will not use, divulge, or reproduce any part of the evaluated content before its publication.
Please read the instructions below carefully, as they are key to a constructive and high-quality review process. If you have any doubts, questions, or suggestions, contact the editor responsible for managing the submission you are evaluating.
Evaluation Criteria
For each submission, authors must have presented a cover letter (see the guidelines for authors) pointing out the research problem their paper is approaching and its main contribution to our capacity to understand, solve, or deal with the problem. The cover letter must also list up to the five key original contributions the paper offers to the scientific community.
Based on your expertise, you are expected to evaluate the manuscript and other submitted files regarding:
- Presentation quality, including English -- but remember that writing style is plural and plurality is welcome.
- Relevance and originality: Problem and solution clarity, originality, and relevance.
- Rigour: submissions must be clear regarding how rigor was applied to research design, development, and analysis.
- Reproducibility: submission must present authors' critical thinking and discussions, offering everything readers need to reproduce the work or to understand the research rationale and decisions. The use of AI-generated content must be appropriately acknowledged.
- Responsibility: the reported work must be seen through the lens of social responsibility, mainly regarding ethical concerns. Authors must comply with the Brazilian Computer Society's Code of Conduct and the best ethical principles in science.
- Relevant literature is appropriately cited: manuscripts may neglect relevant references from women, researchers from developing countries (e.g., the ones from the Brazilian Computer Society) and underrepresented groups, small journals, and conferences. Submissions may also include citations to predatory journals or retracted papers. Please look carefully at the quality of the cited references, provide instructions, and suggest adequate references when necessary.
If the submission is an extended version of a conference paper or a pre-print, at least 40% new material must be provided (more is welcome), and the cover letter must indicate how the authors have extended the paper and why it constitutes a worthwhile extension of the original work.
Review Form
When reviewing the submission, you will be asked to fill out a review form using the fields below. Please leave your comments to support editors to make a decision regarding this submission and support authors to improve their work.
General comments: General appreciation, comments, and weak and strong aspects. Please adopt a constructive posture: many authors are students working on their first submissions and need critical but constructive and informative feedback.
Relevant references and representativeness: Do authors cite relevant related works? Articles may neglect relevant references from women, researchers from developing countries (e.g., the ones from the Brazilian Computer Society -- search here), and underrepresented groups. This field has an educational purpose: relevant research from developing countries and underrepresented groups usually receives less attention and is less cited. An effort must be made to reduce scientific structural bias, and looking for relevant references beyond the mainstream is a necessary step.
Open science: This field has an educational purpose: more than presenting and discussing research results, authors must provide access to the research material and data, favoring reproducibility and reuse. If materials cannot be shared publicly, the authors must explain why.
Ethical issues: When applicable, authors must explain how they managed the ethical issues in their research. This field has an educational purpose: more than mentioning approval by an Ethics Review Board (when applicable), authors must explain how ethical issues were considered throughout their study.
Suggestions for the authors: List your suggestions and demands for improvements to the authors. Please read the instructions to see the aspects we expect you to consider. Remember to be constructive in your recommendations.
Comments for the Editors only (not visible to authors): Leave your private comments to the responsible editor. Please use this space to inform the responsible editor regarding ethical issues, plagiarism, critical problems that prevent the paper from being accepted, etc.
