Peer Review

The Editors aim to provide prompt reviews to optimise the quality of the published papers. All submissions are reviewed by an editorial advisory group, who will check for scope, fit, quality, originality, interest for the readership, etc., and recommend acceptance, rejection or referral for review. Submissions sent for review include Research, Reviews, Guidelines, In Practice and Clinical Trials. Editorials, CME, Book reviews, Obituaries and Correspondence do not go through peer review. Once an article has been accepted for peer review, it is assigned to an Associate Editor who will manage it through the peer review process.

A double blind review process is followed, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from each other throughout the review process. A majority of manuscripts will be sent to one or two reviewers, under the management of an editor assigned to the submission. Reviewers as experts in the field provide comments to authors and editors on the importance, originality and scientific merit of the manuscript and suggest changes which may improve the quality and validity of the manuscript. The review process itself takes approximately 4 – 6 weeks to complete but can change depending upon the quality of the manuscript submitted, reviewer’s response and time taken by the authors to submit the revised manuscript.

If the decision is for revision, the author is requested to address each comment by the reviewers, and submit a letter outlining their responses accompanying their revised manuscript. The assigned editor will re-evaluate the revisions and will either make a decision or send the manuscript for a second round of review, usually to the original set of reviewers.  Reviewers will be informed of the outcome of manuscripts which they have reviewed.

The Editor-in-Chief has the final decision on any submitted manuscript.

Publication Scheduling

Monthly (12 issues per annum). Journals are published on the first day of every month. Journal items are published as part of an issue with its own Table of Contents.

General

Online Submissions
To submit your research to the SAMJ online please register or login at www.samj.org.za

Journal Identifiers


eISSN: 2078-5135
print ISSN: 0256-9574