Peer-review records for TR Dizin: is your file ready for evaluation?

Getting into TR Dizin (Türkiye’s national journal index, run by TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM) is one of the most concrete goals a Turkish academic journal can have — being indexed there means articles count in the “national article” category of associate-professorship applications, and it directly affects a journal’s power to attract authors.

General guides to the application process are plentiful; in this post we focus on the single area where files most often struggle: documenting the peer-review process. Because the formal items in the criteria (masthead, board composition, publication schedule) can be fixed in a few days — but process records cannot be produced retroactively. Either they were kept from the start, or they do not exist.

Important: TR Dizin criteria can be updated; before applying, always rely on the official criteria page. The headings below summarize the process-related criteria as they stood at this post’s publication date.

What the criteria demand of process records

The peer-review core of the official criteria can be gathered under four headings:

At least two reviewers, with institutional diversity. Each article requires evaluation by at least two reviewers — with care taken that they come from different institutions. The phrase “with care taken” allows flexibility, but the direction is clear: a journal running on two reviewers from the same department should be prepared for the diversity question.

Reports containing genuine evaluation. Reviewer reports are expected to carry the character of scholarly assessment; reports consisting of a single “suitable” or of formal box-ticking alone may create the appearance of a working process, but they fall short in evaluation.

A process file. The process from submission to decision — submission, reviewer reports, revisions, decisions — must be documentable and compilable for evaluation. In other words, the question asked is not just “did you conduct peer review?” but “can you show that you did?”

A retention period. Peer-review records must be kept for at least five years after publication. Five years is long enough to span editor changes and computer replacements — a horizon on which “it was in the former editor’s archive” is not an acceptable answer.

An ethics dimension accompanies these: for studies requiring ethics-committee approval, the approval must have been obtained, declared in the article, and documented — all part of the same file.

The filing problem of a process run over email

Now consider a typical journal’s reality: submissions arrive by email, files go to reviewers as attachments, reports come back as Word documents, decisions are made over the phone or in a meeting. This journal may genuinely be conducting peer review — but when filing time comes, it faces the following jobs:

• Sifting article-by-article correspondence out of three years of email archives,
• Remembering which report belongs to which revision,
• Writing up minutes, after the fact, for decisions given verbally,
• And merging all of it into one orderly file per article.

This is an archaeology project that takes weeks and is never complete. Worse: a file “pulled together” retroactively is distinguishable from a record that accumulated naturally, and its credibility is lower.

The right construction: the file as a by-product of the process

The alternative is simple: if the process already flows through a system, the file is the process’s by-product. The submission comes in through the system → the submission date is on record. The reviewer is assigned in the system → invitation, acceptance, and report dates are on record. The report is written into a form → content and version are on record. The decision is issued in the system → rationale and date are on record. Five-year retention is a natural property of the infrastructure, not of an archiving policy.

In Nasirus there is a reporting layer on top of this construction: a TR Dizin-compatible peer-review process report, produced per journal in a single export. Preparing the evaluation file shrinks from a three-week project to a few minutes’ export. Nor does the double-blind arrangement suffer for the record-keeping discipline; identities stay protected within the process while record integrity lives on separately.

The other face of the process: the monitoring period

An overlooked fact: the TR Dizin relationship does not end with the application. Accepted journals continue to be monitored; compliance with the criteria is not a one-off exam but a commitment to continuity. The publication schedule must not slip, the board composition must be kept current, and each new issue’s process records must accumulate under the same order.

This also explains why the habit of “application-season mobilization” is risky. A journal that assembles the file once, with great effort, and then slides back to its old ways after acceptance will relive the same archaeology a few years later — this time with more to lose. Here is where the real return on building a record-producing process shows itself: application and monitoring alike become by-products of ordinary operations.

Editor transitions are the most delicate moment for that continuity. In Türkiye, journal editorships are mostly rotational; the role changes hands every three or four years. If records live in personal archives, every handover is a data loss. If they live in the system, the handover amounts to assigning a role to the new editor — and the five-year retention obligation runs independently of who happens to be in the chair.

A quick self-assessment before applying

Probe your file’s readiness with these five questions:

1. Could you produce the complete process file of a randomly chosen article (submission → reports → revisions → decision) within an hour?
2. For the past year’s articles, is each reviewer’s institutional affiliation on record?
3. Do your reports contain substantive evaluation, or formal checks?
4. Can you access the reviewer records of an issue from five years ago today?
5. For articles requiring ethics-committee approval, are the approval documents matched to the article?

If you can answer “yes” to all five, you are comfortable on the filing side; you can focus on the formal items of the criteria. If the “no”s are in the majority, your first job is not to wrestle the criteria list — it is to move the process onto ground that produces records. To see that ground, book a demo.