Before distributing products to consumers, manufacturers must conduct quality control inspections to confirm they meet industry standards and expectations. Similarly, as purveyors of information, journal editors must perform technical checks (a.k.a. quality checks or QC) to determine whether manuscripts are fit for peer review and, ultimately, publication.
What technical checks should your editorial team be completing? When should technical checks be done? And how can you optimize the process for speed and efficiency? We break down what you need to know in this blog post.
Table of Contents
- What are academic journal technical checks or quality checks?
- What to include in your technical checklist
- Tips for optimizing technical checks
- Putting it all together
What are academic journal technical checks or quality checks?
If you’re newer to journal editing, you may be wondering what the term “technical checks” means. Technical checks or quality checks are when editors vet submissions to see if they contain complete information and adhere to journal policies and ethical guidelines in order to determine whether they should be desk rejected or sent out for peer review. Editors may also save some technical check steps for later in the peer review process when manuscripts are more likely to be accepted for publication.
Benefits of establishing a technical checks process
The benefits of creating a standard technical checklist for your editorial team to use to assess all incoming submissions are many, including:
- Ensuring submissions adhere to ethical and procedural standards, to help speed up peer review and avoid inadequate submissions from being sent for review
- Enabling reviewers to focus on content quality instead of technicalities, leading to more constructive feedback
- Preventing possible peer review and publication delays caused by incomplete submissions
What to include in your technical checklist
Different journals will have varying technical checklist needs based on the research standards of their field/discipline and the specifics of their peer review and publishing processes. However, generally, all technical checklists should encompass the core assessment areas below.
Submission relevance and details
First, you’ll want to ensure incoming submissions fit within the aims and scope of your journal and that they’re complete and well constructed. Manuscript details to review include:
- Title and abstract: Ensure they are clear, concise, and reflective of the content
- Author information: Check that complete details (e.g., name, affiliation, email) were provided for all authors and that nothing looks suspect
- Funding information: Confirm that authors disclosed funding sources and the role of funders (if any) in research study design, data collection, analysis, or writing as necessary (e.g., in the acknowledgment section of the submitted manuscript)
- Keywords (if required): Confirm the submitting author provided the correct number of keywords and that they are relevant to the manuscript
- Cover Letter (if required): Review the cover letter to see if it adequately and compellingly conveys why the submission should be considered by the journal
Adherence to journal policies
Next, you’ll want to ensure incoming submissions fulfill all your journal’s publication policies and comply with necessary ethical standards. This includes checking for a completed journal ethics statement and/or individual forms containing the following as applicable:
- Statements of originality and disclosures: forms or affirmations confirming the originality of the submission, permissions for any reproduced materials, adherence to authorship policies, and disclosures of any potential competing interests/conflicts of interest (e.g., funding sources and personal affiliations)
- Plagiarism detection: run the paper through plagiarism detection software like the Crossref Similarity Check service if applicable (learn more about plagiarism detection best practices in this webinar)
- Copyright statements: review necessary copyright forms or affirmations (remember even fully OA journals should have copyright policies to ensure authors understand the CCO or Creative Commons attributions available to them!)
- Data availability and integrity: ensure the submitting author provided data availability statements per your journal guidelines (e.g., in the Materials and Methods section of the paper) with DOIs and data citations as necessary, and that at least one author had access to all the data and takes responsibility for the accuracy of the data and data analysis
- AI declaration (see current EASE recommendations): ensure the authors declared information regarding AI use in the preparation of the manuscript as required, such as in an AI statement (see an example here)
Depending on your journal’s subject area, you may also need to include quality check steps to ensure authors comply with ethical requirements for human and/or animal studies. This includes checking for the following as applicable:
- Confirmation of registration of clinical trials
- Criteria and methods for race and ethnicity reporting (e.g., who determined race/ethnicity and whether the options were defined by the investigator)
- A statement regarding informed consent (or waiver of consent) for human studies
- A statement of Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Institutional Animal Care and Use (IACUC) approval (or exemption)
- A statement of compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki
- Conformation of adherence to reporting guidelines by study type (e.g., CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA, etc.) per the current EQUATOR Network documentation
Technical content quality
In addition to confirming that incoming submissions are relevant, complete, and in adherence with your journal policies and ethical guidelines, it’s a good idea to give each paper a cursory review for apparent content quality and readability. This includes checking:
- Language and grammar: the paper should be professional in style and tone with no major errors
- Figures, graphs, and equations: all should be legible and formatted per journal guidelines with units and labels clearly defined
- Statistical analysis: Methods should be properly described and appropriate to the study design with confidence intervals, p-values, or other relevant metrics reported
Manuscript structure and formatting
Finally, you’ll want to ensure that submissions are properly formatted to be peer reviewed and then processed by your production team/service should they be accepted for publication.
We highly recommend limiting submission formatting requirements for authors and corresponding technical checks for editors to only what is absolutely necessary (more on this below). Aspects of formatting to focus on to help facilitate peer review include:
- Word count: ensure the manuscript meets journal-specific limits for the main text and abstract (no sense in reviewers spending time on a submission that isn’t a possible fit)
- Figures and tables: should be numbered consecutively, acceptable resolution, properly labeled, cited in the text, and accompanied by descriptive captions
- Supplementary materials: should be clearly labeled and submitted as separate files, if applicable
Tips for optimizing technical checks
Now that we’ve gone over the key manuscript areas to cover in your journal’s technical checklist, let’s talk about how to optimize journal technical checks or quality checks.
At the highest level, it’s critical to strike the right balance during technical checks, particularly pre-review, to ensure they’re robust enough to prevent submissions from being sent out for peer review by mistake or prematurely but not so exhaustive that they lead to protracted initial decision timelines. Below are some tips to help your editorial team optimize your technical checklist for efficiency to help speed up your time to publication, not slow it down.
Limit manuscript formatting steps as much as possible
Does your journal require authors to complete a list of manuscript formatting steps as part of your submission process? To start, consider which of those steps are essential and, more importantly, which can be cut.
For example, ensuring figures and tables are adequate in resolution, legible, and listed in the right order is critical to facilitating peer review. However, you don’t want your editors or submitting authors spending a lot of time perfecting the formatting aesthetics of submissions that may not even be accepted. Such situations can complicate your submission process and frustrate authors, as many expressed in Scholastica’s 2023 author experience survey.
Asking authors to closely follow formatting guidelines for manuscript fonts, headings, spacing, layout, citation styles, and the like was once a way to eliminate manual production work later on. However, today, it’s possible to automate virtually all of those steps so authors don’t need to do them. Be sure to ask your production provider what automation opportunities they offer and ensure you’re taking advantage of those opportunities by removing unnecessary formatting steps from your manuscript preparation guidelines.
If you still have a heavily manual journal production process, now’s the time to explore single-source production solutions that can automatically convert your original manuscripts into desired article styles as well as PDF, HTML, and XML file types, like the Scholastica Production Service. You can learn more about how Scholastica is helping journals speed up production by eliminating manual manuscript formatting steps in this blog post.
Provide clear instructions for authors
In addition to winnowing down your manuscript preparation guidelines to only essential requirements, another preemptive step your editorial team can take to help streamline your technical checks process is honing your instructions for authors. Among the primary ways you can do this, which we cover in more detail in this Scholastica blog post, are:
- Making your author instructions easy to follow by organizing information under clear headers and using tables, bullets, and checklists to break up technical manuscript preparation steps
- Providing standard forms and templates for journal and ethical policies as applicable, such as sample data availability statements like this list from Yale University
- Consolidating author instructions into one location so they’re easier to find and you’re less likely to run the risk of authors encountering inconsistencies (e.g., if you have discrepancies between your “For Authors” page and a separate submission preparation PDF guide)
Leverage submission form requirements and validations
Finally, remember that your submission form is your friend and can help you simplify and even eliminate many common technical check steps!
If you use editorial management software that offers submission form customization options, like the Scholastica Peer Review System, you can make all necessary manuscript information and accompanying file upload fields required so authors don’t miss them and include form validations for metadata elements as applicable to ensure inputs are correct and complete automatically. Examples include:
- ORCID: include a required validated ORCID iD field
- Institutional affiliation: add a required validated ROR or Ringgold ID field (learn more about the benefits of ROR in this Scholastica blog interview)
- Funding information: add required funding information fields and validate funding sources against Crossref’s Funder Registry
- The Contributor Roles Taxonomy a.k.a. CRediT: Require submitting authors to complete CRediT fields to standardize reporting on all authors and contributors involved in the preparation of a manuscript (learn more in this webinar)
- Keywords: require authors to choose from a pre-set list of keywords
- Required journal policy information: include required file upload fields and affirmation checkboxes to help ensure authors review and adhere to all of your journal policies and ethical guidelines (they’ll appreciate this!)
Scholastica Peer Review System users can learn more about customizing their submission form in this blog post.
Putting it all together
At the end of the day, a well-optimized technical checklist will help your journal editors streamline the processing of incoming submissions and get ahead of potential publication delays, making your peer review and publishing processes better for all involved.
We hope you’ve found this quick guide to technical checks helpful! If you have any questions, please feel free to add them to the comments section below. Happy editing!
