Articles submitted to the Trace journal will initially undergo a pre-evaluation conducted by a member of the Editorial Committee, who will verify the scientific rigor, relevance, scope, and relevance of the manuscript. If it passes this first evaluation, it will be subjected to two double-blind peer reviews. This process is a strategy in the scientific method where the individuals who evaluate and those who are evaluated are unaware of each other's identity in order to avoid conscious or unconscious subjective bias.
The selected evaluators will be specialists in the field affiliated with national or foreign universities. The editorial office will request their collaboration and send the manuscript in .doc format, as well as a unique evaluation format, which raises questions related to the text structure, methodology used, contributions made, relevance of references used, and accessibility of the writing.
The results of the evaluations are:
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Publishable without changes. The manuscript does not require modifications beyond those made by a style corrector.
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Publishable with modifications. The author requires making changes to their manuscript, which can be superficial or in-depth. This result obliges the author to fully address the comments of the specialists before resubmitting their article for final evaluation. For this purpose, they will be asked to include a comparative table indicating, in one column, the changes requested by the evaluator(s) and, in another, the corresponding modification in their final text, indicating page and paragraph number.
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Rejected. The article does not have the necessary elements for publication.
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Controversy. This arises when one evaluation is positive (publishable without modifications or publishable without changes) and the other is negative. In these cases, the manuscript will be sent to a third reading that will determine whether it is published with the integrated corrections or the publication is postponed.
If both evaluations are negative, the article will not be published in the journal. The decision of the evaluators and members of the Editorial Committee is final.