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• Article types
• Review criteria
• Additional review criteria (Data for Policy Conference Proceedings)
• Fast track process
• Resources

Article types

Articles submitted to Data & Policy are subject to a single blind review process and are seen by a minimum of two reviewers. In the event that an article is revised and resubmitted, the same reviewers will typically be asked to review the revised manuscript. Please consider the type of paper you’ve been asked to review and what it aims to achieve. Data & Policy publishes:

• Research articles that use rigorous methods that investigate how data science can inform or impact policy by, for example, improving situation analysis, predictions, public service design, and/or the legitimacy and/or effectiveness of policy making.
• Commentaries are shorter articles that discuss and/or problematize an issue relevant to the Data & Policy scope.
• Translational articles are focused on the transfer of knowledge from research to practice and from practice to research. See our guide to writing translational papers.
• Data papers provide a structured description of an openly available dataset with potential for reuse. Note that we generally expect the data and code described in the paper to be openly available as per the journal's Research Transparency policy, with control access mechanisms if described if the nature of the data requires this.
• Data & Policy Reports  are articles invited by the journal to survey the landscape of data-policy interactions. Data & Policy Reports are independently reviewed by a reviewer not connected to the journal before publication. 
• Data for Policy Conference Papers are full articles that are submitted for the Data for Policy Conference, the strategic partner and community from which the Data & Policy journal originates. These articles are simultaneously considered for the Conference and the journal.

Review criteria 

Alongside the rating (accept / minor revisions / major revisions / reject) you will be prompted to complete two sections.

In 'Confidential Comments to Editor‘, you should provide:

• A statement about any conflicts of interest: any financial, professional and personal relationships that have the potential to bias or perceive to bias the review. If none exist, state: ‘None’;
• Any other comments for the editor too sensitive to pass to the author.

In ‘Comments to the Author‘, your remarks should include:

• Your summary of the signficance of the article, noting what you think is original or interesting, bearing in mind the aims of the article type (e.g. a replication study will not present original findings);
• Your judgement of the overall quality of the paper and its suitability for publication;
• Your evaluation of whether the paper is technically correct and scientifically sound. Note that each research paper should contain a ‘Data Availability Statement’ that makes a declaration about the availability of the underlying data and materials in the interest of transparency and reproducibility;
• An assessment of whether the paper is written clearly and whether its length is appropriate;
• Detailed suggestions for improving the paper, including suggestions about the overall approach and structure of the paper and for additional work that might be required.

Additional criteria (Data for Policy Conference Proceedings)

Data & Policy works closely with the Data for Policy Conference. As of 2023 authors of full papers interested in being considered for the Conference are asked to submit their work directly to the Data & Policy journal's system in the 'Data for Policy Conference Proceedings Paper' category, as per our integrated process. Given the timeline the Data for Policy Conference works towards, we ask reviewers of Conference papers to commit to returning their review by the stated deadline.

Please note that the underlying principle of our integrated review process is that an accept in the journal is effectively an accept in the conference, and likewise for reject decisions, i.e. papers cannot be accepted or rejected for one and not the other.

In your 'Comments to the Authors' we ask you to also comment on the following considerations for the Conference:

• Potential contribution to the debates in the field
• Potential for stimulating debate in the Conference
• Freshness of the content, novelty and originality
• Formulation of the research/policy question
• Data and methodology
• Quality of writing and presentation

See the information for reviewers page on the conference website for full details of the conference review process at https://dataforpolicy.org/2024-reviewers-info/

Fast track process

We invite a small numbers of articles per year to undergo a fast track review process. Typically these are articles that have been presented at a conference and are judged by the editors to be in a sufficiently advanced state to merit this process, or those that engage with an issue important or urgent enough to necessitate rapid assessment. We do not expect detailed comments on fast track papers. Instead, reviewers should focus on whether the findings are supported by the analysis and whether the article merits publication. 

Resources