Before initiating the peer-review process, the Editor-in-Chief will assign the submitted manuscript to a Managing Editor and additional Associate Editors for preliminary evaluation. This initial assessment ensures that the manuscript aligns with the journal’s scope, meets basic quality standards, and is ready to be sent for external review. The editorial team reserves the right to reject any manuscript that does not meet these standards or falls outside the journal’s scope.

The Managing Editor, together with any assigned Associate Editors, will invite at least two qualified reviewers to evaluate the manuscript. All manuscripts undergo a double-blind peer-review process, ensuring that both author and reviewer identities remain concealed throughout the review to maintain academic objectivity and integrity.

The review process evaluates the novelty, originality, objectivity, methodology, scientific contribution, and conclusion of the manuscript. Reviewer comments are forwarded to the corresponding author for necessary revisions and responses. The Editorial Board assesses the reviewers’ recommendations and issues the final decision regarding the manuscript. Reviewers are selected based on expertise, experience, and professional qualifications, and the journal maintains a diverse pool of national and international reviewers to ensure high-quality and impartial evaluations.

All submissions and review reports are treated as confidential. Reviewers are prohibited from sharing or using any content from the manuscripts for personal or professional gain. They are expected to provide constructive, unbiased, and timely feedback, declare any potential conflicts of interest, and recuse themselves when necessary. The journal upholds strict publication ethics, including the prevention of plagiarism, data fabrication, and other unethical practices, and reviewers are required to support these standards. Pancasila: Jurnal Keindonesiaan requires all editors, authors, and reviewers to use the electronic submission system for all editorial communications and to employ the journal’s plagiarism screening tools (Turnitin Similarity Check/iThenticate).

Desk Review. At the desk review stage, manuscripts will be examined to ensure that they have met the writing guideline, focus, and scope with excellent academic quality. If they do not meet the conditions, the author will be given the opportunity to revise their manuscript according to the given criteria. However, there is also the possibility that the manuscript will be directly rejected.

Peer review. When the manuscript has passed the desk review stage, it will then be delivered to two reviewers who are experts in the field of the submitted manuscript. The review process will be done within 3 weeks. Manuscripts that did not successfully pass the desk review process will not proceed to this stage.

Reviewer’s decision. The reviewers will provide the following recommendations:

• Accepted by Minor Revisions, means that the manuscript is acceptable for publication once it is revised in response to the reviewers’ concerns (let authors revised with stipulated time);
• Accepted by Major Revisions, means that substantive inadequacies in the manuscript, such as data analysis, the main theory used, and rewriting of paragraphs, need to be revised (let authors revised with stipulated time);
• Resubmit (conditional rejection), means that the manuscript is willing to reconsider the paper in another round of decision making after the authors make major changes;
• Rejected (outright rejection), means that the manuscript is not acceptable for publication or the given reviews relate to very basic issues.