The Recoletos Multidisciplinary Research Journal (RMRJ) is the official bi-annual journal of the University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJ-R) Center for Policy, Research, and Development Studies (CPRDS). Being an internationally peer-reviewed journal, RMRJ adopts the double-blind review process wherein the reviewer/s and the author/s do not know each other's identity.
Aims
RMRJ is dedicated to the promotion of knowledge through high-quality research publication in various disciplines. It adheres to the policy that all articles contained therein must meet the rigors of an independent double-blind peer-reviewing system and editing to ensure that the publication possesses scientific and academic merit.
Scope
RMRJ welcomes submission of quality research in any of the following academic domains:
- Accountancy, Business and Management, and Finance;
- Communication, Humanities, Psychology, and Religion;
- Education and Educational Management;
- Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, and Technology;
- Environment, Health, and Natural Sciences;
- Philosophical and Mathematical Reviews; and
- Politics and Governance, and Social Sciences.
Article Types
- Editorial
Editorials are brief opinion pieces, up to 1,500 words, on timely or significant topics relevant to the journal's scope. Abstracts are not required. Submissions are by invitation or with prior approval; authors must contact the editorial staff before submitting. - Review Article
Review Articles provide critical evaluations of the literature, including systematic reviews, meta-analyses, or bibliometric studies. They must include an abstract of up to 250 words and are limited to 5,000 words. Figures and tables are included as needed. Ethics, funding, and conflict of interest statements are required. - Letter to the Editor
Letters to the Editor are brief communications, up to 1,000 words, that comment on published articles or introduce concise findings. No abstract is required. Submissions may include up to 2 figures/tables and 6 references. Authors must contact the editorial office to request permission to submit. Funding and conflict of interest disclosures are mandatory. - Commentary
Commentaries are short discussion articles of up to 1,500 words, with abstracts limited to 300 words. They address timely issues or respond to previously published content. Submissions may include up to 4 figures/tables and 12 references. Most are invited, though unsolicited proposals are welcome; authors should contact the editor prior to submission. Funding and conflict disclosures are required. - Perspective
Perspective articles offer thoughtful, often original, discussions on a specific scientific topic, limited to 3,000 words. An abstract of up to 300 words is required. Submissions typically include around 6 figures/tables and up to 50 references. Funding and conflict of interest statements are required. - Field Report
Field Reports present scientific reflections on fieldwork, university outreach, or related projects, and are limited to 3,000 words. They require an abstract of up to 300 words and typically include around 6 figures/tables and no more than 50 references. Submissions must include funding and conflict of interest disclosures.
Editorial Process
RMRJ is dedicated to promoting knowledge through high-quality research publications in various disciplines. It is committed to editorial independence, diversity, and equity. Submissions from people of different backgrounds and geographic locations are welcome. Submissions are assigned to editors who will do the initial review. Should the manuscript be suitable for consideration by RMRJ, the paper will be sent to at least two independent peer reviewers. The peer reviewers' assessments are used to inform the associate editor's decision on whether or not to recommend publication. Endorsed papers will be forwarded to the Chief Editor for final approval.
We do not put up with rude behavior or letters directed at our editors, staff, or other people helping us publish. We have the right to take appropriate measures to safeguard others from it. This situation may involve, for instance, withdrawing a manuscript from consideration or objecting to offensive remarks made by peers.
Peer Review Process
Peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. It requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field who are qualified and able to perform impartial reviews. Likewise, it also refers to the work done while screening submitted manuscripts and funding applications. This normative process encourages authors to meet the accepted standards of their discipline. It prevents disseminating unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal views. Peer review increases the probability that weaknesses will be identified and fixed. For both grant funding and publication in a scholarly journal, it is also usually required that the subject be both novel and substantial.
Reviewers and editors are responsible for providing a constructive and prompt evaluation of submitted research papers based on the significance of their contribution and the rigors of analysis and presentation.
There are two or three referees for a given article. Two are experts on the topic, and one is an expert in research and statistics who shall review the technical components of the research. These referees revert the evaluation of the work that indicates the observed weaknesses or problems along with suggestions for improvement. The board then evaluates the referees' comments and notes the opinion of the manuscript before passing the decision with the referees' comments back to the author(s).
Reviewer Guidelines
The reviewers may be experts in their respective fields, members of the Editorial Board, or individuals recommended by the editorial board during the initial screening. Reviewers are tasked with assessing the manuscript’s quality and offering a recommendation to the editorial team regarding its acceptance, need for revision, or rejection.
The reviewers are requested to:
- Respond promptly to review invitations based on the manuscript’s title and abstract, either accepting or declining.
- Suggest alternative expert reviewers if unable to accept the invitation.
- Request an extension promptly if additional time is needed to complete a thorough review.
Conflict of Interest Disclosure
Reviewers must disclose any potential conflicts of interest. If uncertain about whether a situation constitutes a conflict, they should contact the journal’s Editorial Office for guidance. Examples of potential conflicts include, but are not limited to:
- Employment at the same institution as any of the manuscript’s authors.
- Collaboration, co-authorship, shared funding, or other academic associations with any authors within the past three years.
- Personal relationships or rivalries with the authors.
- Financial gain or loss linked to the manuscript’s publication.
Reviewers should be transparent about any circumstances that may be perceived as bias influencing their judgment. Prior review of the same manuscript for another journal is not considered a conflict; reviewers can inform the Editorial Office about any changes or improvements since the previous review.
Confidentiality and Anonymity
Reviewers must maintain strict confidentiality regarding the manuscript’s content, including the abstract, until official publication. Reviewers should avoid revealing their identity to authors within their comments or report metadata. If a reviewer wishes to delegate the review to a colleague, prior approval from the Editorial Office is required, and the substitute must meet the journal’s reviewer eligibility criteria.
Preparing the Review Report
Reviewers should prepare reports in English and carefully consider all parts of the manuscript, including supplementary materials, data, figures, and methods. Reviews should provide a comprehensive critique of both the overall manuscript and specific sections or key concepts. Comments must be detailed enough to enable authors to effectively respond and improve their work.
Reviewers should not insist on citing their own work, colleagues’ work, or the journal’s publications unless it is essential to enhance the manuscript’s quality. Excessive or inappropriate citation requests, including self-citations, honorary citations, or citation manipulation, are unacceptable.
Reviews must be written in a respectful, constructive tone aimed at facilitating manuscript improvement. Unprofessional or derogatory language will not be tolerated.
Use of generative AI tools or large language models (LLMs) in drafting review reports is prohibited.
Evaluate the manuscript based on the following criteria:
- Novelty: Is the research question original and clearly defined? Do the findings contribute new knowledge to the field?
- Quality: Is the article well-written? Are the data and analyses clearly and appropriately presented? Does the presentation meet high standards?
- Methodological Rigor: Is the study well-designed and methodologically rigorous? Are analyses performed with technical precision? Is the data robust enough to support conclusions?
- Publication Merit: Does publishing this work provide value? Does it advance knowledge or address an important, longstanding question through well-conceived experiments?
- Readability/Language proficiency: Is the English clear and comprehensible?
Criteria for Acceptance and Rejection
A manuscript is accepted when
- it is endorsed for publication by at least two referees,
- it substantially complies with the instructions of the reviewers;
- it complies with the ethical standards and protocols with studies involving humans and animals;
- the manuscript passed the plagiarism detection test with a score of at most 10% Similarity Index and a Grammarly Rating of 95% or more. Otherwise, the manuscript is returned to the author(s).
The referees' evaluations include an explicit recommendation of what to do with the manuscript, chosen from options provided by the journal. Most recommendations are along the following lines:
- Accept without revisions
- Accept with minor revisions
- Accept with major revisions
- Reject with the option to resubmit
- Reject
In situations where the referees disagree substantially about the quality of work, there are several strategies for reaching a decision. When the editor receives positive and negative reviews for the same manuscript, the board will solicit one or more additional reviews as a tie-breaker. In the case of ties, the board may invite authors to reply to a referee's criticisms and permit a compelling rebuttal to break the tie. Suppose the editor does not feel confident in weighing the persuasiveness of a rebuttal. In that case, the board may solicit a response from the referee who made the original criticism. In rare instances, the board will convey communications between an author and a referee, thereby allowing them to debate on a point. Even in such a case, however, the board does not allow referees to confer with each other, and the goal of the process is explicitly not to reach a consensus or to convince anyone to change his/ her opinions.
Comments
RMRJ welcomes the submission of comments on previous articles. Comments on articles previously published in the journal will generally be reviewed by two reviewers, usually an author of the original article (to assist the editor in evaluating whether the submitted comment represents the previous article's accuracy) and an independent reviewer. The original author will be invited to reply if a comment is accepted for publication. All other editorial requirements, as enumerated above, apply to proposed comments.
Transparency
RMRJ makes it a point of adhering to COPE's Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, and we encourage our publishing partners to do the same.
Privacy Statement
The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.
Publication Frequency and Fee
The publication of the RMRJ is bi-annual. Article submission is completely free. Every article published is free of any processing or publishing fees.
Turnaround Time
The time it takes to publish a submitted paper can range from four months to one year. This timeline depends on peer reviewers' availability and authors' timely revisions and document submissions.
Sponsor and Source of Support
The RMRJ is sponsored and funded by the Center for Policy, Research, and Development Studies of the University of San Jose-Recoletos; contact number 032-2537900 loc. 244; Email: recoletos_journal@usjr.edu.ph
RMRJ History
CHED memo no. 46 series of 2012 plays a pivotal role in the creation of the Recoletos Multidisciplinary Research Journal (RMRJ). The said memorandum stipulated that for universities to attain its mandate, they should have faculty members "participate in research and development activities in their respective discipline as evidenced by refereed publications and other scholarly outputs" (CHED memo no. 46, 2012, sec, 23.3).
The University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJR) responded to this memo with alacrity. The initial meeting for this purpose was then realized in the middle of 2012, with former CHED Commissioner, Dr. Roberto Padua, who then accepted the position as mentor and consultant of the university's enabling research program. The rest of 2012 was spent on the drafting of the MOA between the consultant and the university, as well as the training design and guidelines that will be adopted.
In January 2013, an orientation on the Capability-Building and Research Productivity Enhancement Program was conducted at Fr. Blas Hall, with participating researchers from different colleges/schools. Dr. Juanito Aliño, Jr., the director of the Center for Policy, Research, and Development Studies (CPRDS), read the rationale of the program and the role of the researchers in retaining the university status of USJR. There were fifteen researchers who composed batch 1 of the research enabling program.
On February 20-22, 2013, the first training session with Dr. Padua commenced. This training was conducted together with a private higher education institution (HEI). The succeeding months saw the joint research training of researchers from USJ-R and from other HEIs in Cebu. The research outputs from this training necessitated a venue for faculty publication. Hence, the Adelante Research Journal came about as an enthusiastic and alacritic response to such a need. The journal was ultimately named Recoletos Multidisciplinary Research Journal (RMRJ) and was granted category B by CHED in September 2013.
Vol. 1, no. 1 https://rmrj.usjr.edu.ph/rmrj/index.php/RMRJ/issue/view/11 has 11 articles from batch 1 researchers from different schools/colleges, CPRDS staff, and guest authors:
School of Arts and Science
Mr. Joey Estorosos Mr. Virgilio C. Lumayno Jr.
Mr. Wilfred Rios Mr. Roberto M. Cabardo
Mrs. Sandy V. Chua Engr. Ma. Teresa Barola
Center for Religious Education School of Education
Mrs. Jessica M. Avenido Ms. Helmae N. Etulle
School of Business and Management School of Allied and Medical Sciences
Ms. Kristine June Uy Mr. Melvin R. de Castro
Ms. Rosario L. Cabillada Mr. Tonette M. Villanueva
Mr. Chris Naval
Mrs. Elena Camilo
School of Engineering School of Computer Studies
Engr. Efren O. Barabat Ms. Joan Lou Marie M. Reyes
Engr. Randy K. Salazar
The editorial staff of RMRJ's maiden issue was composed of the following persons:
Dr. Agnes Sequino - Editor-in-chief
Dr. Juanito Alino, Jr. - Managing editor
Dr. Brian Vasquez - Associate editor
Dr. Glenn Pajares - Associate editor
Mr. Le Roy Gerald Sarchez - Editorial supporting staff
Mr. Jesse Susada - Editorial supporting staff
Ms. Mila Baclayon - Editorial supporting staff
Mr. Mark Borres - Editorial supporting staff
Vol. 1.2 of the RMRJ was dedicated to research on Fractal Modelling. It was recognized and awarded by CHED as one of the Category A journals in August 2014. The second semester of 2014-2015 paved the way for changes in the editorial board. Dr. Jessica Magallon-Avenido assumed the post of the journal's managing editor, and eight associate editors from Japan, Nigeria, India, and the USA were added to the Editorial board. RMRJ's primary emphasis on quality publication is evidenced in the steps taken by the new set of Editorial Board, leading to the journal being indexed in Google Scholar, being awarded as a CHED Journal Incubation Program (JIP) grantee in August 2017, and the journal's inclusion in the ASEAN Citation Index (ACI) in November 2017.
With the adoption of the Open Journal System (OJS) in 2017, all articles published in RMRJ and the entire publication process are now made available online.
RMRJ's next step is ensuring the visibility of quality publications. She got indexed in CROSSREF and in the Philippine E-Journals (PEJ) in 2018. The constant quest for excellence ushered in the onboarding in 2019 of Dr. Nilo Bugtai as Editor-in-Chief and the associate editors who are authorities in their field of expertise. In 2020, the migration of health and health-related papers to Herdin PLUS was started. RMRJ became part of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Visayas Mindanao Consortium for Journal Publication, Inc. (VMCJPI) in 2021. The journal has also been added to the list of the Andrew Gonzalez Philippines Citation Index in the early part of 2022.
On August 28, 2022, RMRJ achieved another milestone. The journal has been accepted for Scopus, the world's largest and one of the two most widely-used citation databases. Through the Scopus Title Evaluation Team, the Scopus Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB) approved RMRJ's inclusion in Scopus. With this feat, USJR joins UP System, ADMU, DLSU Manila, UST, and USTP as the only Philippine-based universities with Scopus-indexed journals.
The journal continues to dedicate itself to the quality conversation in the different fields of endeavor. We invite you to join us in this ongoing conversation.
Adelante!