Ethical Standards Expected of Peer Reviewers

• Professional Competence and Expertise: Reviewers should accept peer-review invitations exclusively for manuscripts that fall strictly within their precise sub-field of specialization and research expertise (e.g., digital journalism, communication theories, public relations, and political communication). They must immediately decline the invitation on ethical grounds should they identify any deficiency in their specialized knowledge regarding the manuscript.
• Absolute Confidentiality and Non-Exploitation: A manuscript under review is a strictly confidential document protected by the intellectual property rights of its authors. It is strictly forbidden to share the draft, its metadata, or accompanying data with any third party (including colleagues, departmental peers, or graduate students). Furthermore, reviewers are completely prohibited from exploiting or utilizing any unpublished ideas, findings, or data in their personal research, publications, or teaching activities.
• Digital Integrity and Data Protection: In maintaining confidentiality as a non-negotiable principle, it is strictly prohibited to upload or input submitted manuscript drafts, or any portion thereof, into public generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platforms (such as ChatGPT) for summarization, editing, or evaluation. This mandate ensures that authors' unpublished data is not integrated into the training datasets of external AI models.
• Impartiality and Conflict of Interest: Although the journal operates under a double-blind peer-review system, if a reviewer deduces the author's identity or uncovers any form of conflict of interest, they must immediately decline the evaluation. This includes instances of direct professional collegiality, institutional affiliation, familial kinship, professional competition, or active research collaboration within the past three years, thereby safeguarding the credibility and objectivity of the scientific decision.
• Constructive Criticism and Intellectual Fairness: Reviewers must formulate their critiques and feedback in a dignified, respectful, and scholarly tone, completely free of personal remarks, derogatory critiques, or sarcastic undertones, with the sole purpose of advancing and developing knowledge. Furthermore, a reviewer’s assessment must not be biased by the author's adoption of a specific school of thought or media theory that diverges from the reviewer's personal convictions, provided the author maintains rigorous and sound scientific methodology.