Refereeing is an essential component of peer-reviewed scientific publishing. It can improve the quality of a paper significantly and contributes to advancing science as a whole, even when the decision to publish is negative.

Your expert input as a referee will help guide the Executive Editor handling the paper, who in turn will recommend a decision to the Editor-in-Chief. The DCE Editorial Board can be found here.

The DCE Executive Editorial team and Cambridge University Press greatly appreciate the work done by referees. You will be acknowledged in an end-of-year thank you list.

Types of paper

Please consider the type of paper you’ve been asked to review and what it aims to achieve.

DCE publishes the following article types:

• Research articles using data science methods and models for improving the reliability, resilience, safety, efficiency and usability of engineered systems.
• Systematic reviews providing a detailed, balanced and authoritative current account of the existing literature concerning data-intensive methods in a particular facet of engineering sciences.
• Tutorial reviews providing an introduction and overview of an important topic of relevance to the journal readership. The topic should be of relevance to both students and researchers who are new to the field as well as experts and provide a good introduction to the development of a subject, its current state and indications of future directions the field is expected to take.
• Translational papers: case studies demonstrating the downstream benefits of data-intensive engineering - and the underlying data science principles, techniques and technologies - to wider society, economy, environment, health and way of life.
• Position papers exploring the ethical, legal, security and policy issues related to data-centric engineering; these papers may also concern the standards for, and regulation of, data, methods and models in this emerging area.
• Perspectives providing a personal view on a particular data-centric approach to engineering or on the uptake of or obstacles to data-centric approaches in an engineering discipline.

Your review

DCE aims to assess through the review process whether the article in question provides evidence that data science advances engineering science and practice. As a reviewer, you may have been consulted because of your expertise in particular data science methods, or because of your knowledge of a particular engineering discipline - this should be clear in the invitation letter from the Executive Editor. 

The review form in the DCE ScholarOne system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dce) contains 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 be seen to bias the review. If none exist, state: ‘None’;
• Any other comments for the editor that are too sensitive to pass to the author.

 In ‘Comments to the Corresponding Author‘, please provide

• A summary of the paper, stressing what in it is new and interesting;
• Your judgement of the overall quality of the paper and its suitability for DCE, bearing in mind that the journal is seeking to publish research that uses novel sources of data and data-intensive methods as applied to engineering science and practice
• 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;
• General suggestions for improving the paper, including suggestions about the overall approach and structure of the paper and for additional work that might be required;
• Detailed suggestions for improving the paper.

The journal follows a single blind peer review process: reviews are communicated to authors anonymously, unless reviewers take explicit action to sign the review.

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