By default, Reviewers will have a text form to add their comments on the submission they are reviewing, with a text field for Authors and Editors, and a separate field for Editors only. By using the Review Forms, however, you can create web-based forms that include a variety of pre-set questions to guide your Reviewers and result in more consistent commentary. Setting up a new Review Form for the first time can be a little tricky, so follow these steps carefully.
To create a new Review Form, select Review Forms from the Management Pages menu.
Click on Create Review Form link
Fill in title and description for a review form, then press the Save button. Remember, you can have many Review Forms, targeting them to specific sections or even to specific reviewers. In this example, the review form titled “Articles Form” will be a review form for submissions to the Articles section.
Back on the previous page, the title of a newly-created review form appears.
Click on the Edit link next to the title of review form, and then on the Review Form page select Form Items to start adding questions (i.e., “items”) to this review form.
From the Form Items page, select Create New Item.
On the resulting New Item page, you can configure your first question for this form.
In the Item box, type in the question. You can then select whether or not to make the question required. Finally, choose an item type from the dropdown menu: single word text box, single line text box, extended text box (this is a larger text box allowing for a more detailed response), checkbox (this would allow reviewers to check off one or more choices), radio button (this limits reviewers to selecting a single answer), or drop-down box (this also limits reviewers to selecting a single answer, but does so using a dropdown menu rather than a list of buttons). If you choose the radio button or checkbox option you have the option to Add Selection. Selections are possible checkbox or radio button answers to the question. Remember to Save!
All created items can be edited, deleted or reordered. Additional items (i.e., questions) can be added by clicking on Create New Item. Notice that you can also copy the question to another Review Form if you have more than one.
Selecting Preview Form allows you to view the review form before activating it.
To return to the main Review Form menu, select Review Forms from the breadcrumbs at the top of your screen.
Back at the main Review Forms page, you can create another form (perhaps for your Book Review section), or edit, activate, preview, delete, or re-order existing forms. Once a review form is activated, it is ready to be used by editors when assigning a reviewer.
Note
Once a Review Form has been activated and used in at least one review, it cannot be deleted, deactivated, or modified. This is to preserve data consistency within OJS. You can always stop using a form, or copy previous form items to new forms.
From this page you can also quickly see how many forms are currently “In Review” (i.e., part of review that is still in process) or “Completed” (were used as part of a review that is now finished).