Peer Review Process

The Nigerian Journal of the Humanities publishes 1 issue per year. With her surging popularity and very healthy submissions, NJH is looking forward to publishing two issues each year. The time it takes to publish an article after it is accepted depends on the number of papers we have in the queue.

When the Nigerian Journal of the Humanities receives a manuscript for consideration, editors carry out a desk review and determine whether it should be sent out for external review. This desk review may take up to 4 weeks. A manuscript may be rejected after a desk review. If the manuscript is acceptable for review, 2 expert potential reviewers are requested to review the manuscript. They are sent a reminder if their Review Reports are not turned in as expected. NJH Editors usually resend a manuscript for review to different reviewer if the initial reviewer fails to turn in his/her report after 6 weeks.

Once the Editors receive the two Reviewers’ Reports, they have 2 weeks to take a decision either to reject the manuscript or to further process it. NJH grades Review Reports as follows: If the summary verdict of the first and second reviewer says “Minor Corrections”; NJH will proceed to further process the manuscript. If however there is a split decision between the 2 reviewers (Minor Corrections/Major Corrections), the Editors will have to send the manuscript to a third reviewer. If the third reviewer returns “Minor Corrections”, the manuscript will undergo further processing. If however, the third author returns a “Major Correction” verdict, the manuscript is rejected. When reviews of a manuscript do not agree or if an author sufficiently defends their views from changes requested by reviews, the Editors have the right to make an editorial decision on their own. Once there is evidence of copyright infringements at any point of processing the manuscript, such a manuscript is rejected.

Further processing means, requesting the author to effect the suggestions and corrections observed by the reviewers and the Editors. The authors have 2 weeks to effect these corrections. Once the author turns in the corrected manuscript, it is sent back to the reviewers to ascertain that the corrections requested for have been effected accordingly. A negative verdict from any of the reviewers will mean that the manuscript has to be sent back to the author again.  A positive verdict leads the Editors to the copy-editing stage of the process.   This is the stage where issues of phraseology, typos, missing references, clarity of expressions etc are dealt with. This process usually takes two weeks.

Once the Editors are satisfied with the state of the manuscript, it is formatted into the NJH publication format. The Editors can decide to go to the press once they have between 6 and 10 articles that can constitute an issue. The authors have a right to a published copy of the issue in which their article appears. NJH Editors publish only the Abstracts of freshly articles. Once the articles are declassified, the entire content becomes Free Access from www.nigerianjournalofthehumanties.org