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(Last Updated: October 10, 2026)
Great Plains Research (GPR) publishes original, peer-reviewed scholarship that brings multiple knowledge systems together to illuminate the peoples, cultures, ecologies, and economies of the Great Plains. Peer reviewers foster the integrity of the journal. Your review informs the editor’s decision and helps authors strengthen their work, and we deeply value the expertise and labor you bring to it.
Joining the Reviewer Pool
We are building the reviewer pool across all disciplines and career stages, and we welcome scholars, practitioners, and community partners whose expertise engages the Great Plains. You may join at any time through the interest form on the journal webpage. When a manuscript aligns with your expertise, the editorial team may invite you to review, and you are always free to decline. We ask each reviewer to consider no more than one manuscript per year, so that the work is shared across the pool. All reviews are double-anonymous.
Please accept an invitation only if you have the expertise and availability to complete the review within the requested timeline stated in the invitation email. If your circumstances change, please let us know at gpr@unl.edu. Early notice supports both the authors and the editorial team.
Trust and Confidentiality
Authors share unpublished work with you in trust. Please keep the manuscript, your review, and your recommendation within the editorial process, both during and after the review. Manuscript content should not be shared, cited, or drawn on for your own work, and copies should not be retained once you submit. All communication with authors takes place through gpr@unl.edu.
If anyone, including a graduate student, would assist you in preparing the review, please seek the editor’s approval first. Please suggest citations to your own work only when they genuinely strengthen the manuscript.
If you notice a possible concern, such as plagiarism, fabricated or falsified data, duplicate submission, an ethics or data-governance issue, or undisclosed AI use, please bring it to the editor rather than addressing it yourself.
Conflicts of Interest
Please disclose and step back from the review if you:
- Have co-authored with a submitting author within the past five years.
- Hold a current or recent mentorship relationship with a submitting author.
- Have a financial interest in the research or its outcomes.
Because the review is double-anonymous, you may not know who the authors are. Please reflect on what you can know: whether you recognize the work from a presentation or preprint, whether you suspect a close relationship with a likely author, whether you hold a financial or institutional interest in the topic, or whether any other circumstance would prevent you from reading the work impartially. Some of these only become clear once you begin reading. In a close-knit regional community, such situations are common, and disclosing them is a routine part of the process. Please contact gpr@unl.edu before continuing, and we will find a path forward together.
Review with Care and Accountability
GPR’s peer review emphasizes fairness, inclusivity, and constructive feedback that strengthens contributions. Please engage the work rather than the author, attending to its evidence, reasoning, methods, and presentation rather than the author’s identity, position, institution, or nationality, and remain attentive to your own assumptions as you read.
Offer feedback that is specific, generous, and constructive, with particular care for emerging scholars and for authors writing from communities often underrepresented in academic publishing. Hostile or ad hominem commentary is not acceptable. Where the writing could be clearer, please note it constructively; fluency in English is not a measure of scholarship. Word count and formatting are the responsibility of the author and editorial team, so please focus your attention on substance.
GPR centers Indigenous and community knowledge. As you read, please consider:
- How the work represents communities and histories.
- Whether its relationships with Indigenous and local communities are reciprocal.
- How it attends to power in the research.
- Whether Indigenous and community knowledge is cited and credited as its holders prefer, and whether consent and data governance are documented.
Generative AI
Peer review is an act of expert human judgment, and manuscripts are shared in trust. Please do not enter any part of a manuscript into a generative AI tool, or use AI to summarize, assess, or draft your review.
You may use a tool to refine the grammar or clarity of comments you have written yourself, provided that nothing you enter contains manuscript content. If you do, please disclose the tool, its version, and how you used it when you submit your review. You remain responsible for all content in your review. Reviews generated or substantially shaped by AI will be disqualified, and undisclosed or prohibited use will be investigated under GPR’s misconduct procedures.
Submission Categories
Your invitation names one of three submission categories. The standards of integrity, attribution, and accountability to communities are the same for each. What differs is how you assess whether the work succeeds.
Primary Research
Original empirical work. Please consider whether the methods and evidence support the conclusions.
Integrative Synthesis
Work that connects literatures, disciplines, or knowledge systems. Please consider whether the body of work is adequate to the claim, whether its selection is clearly described, and whether the synthesis offers an understanding that no single source provides on its own.
Creative Scholarship
Essay, narrative, visual, or expressive work whose contribution is carried by its form as well as its content. It opens with a framing statement of about 300 words, and we ask you to engage the work on those terms. An unconventional structure or deliberate ambiguity may be carrying the argument, so please consider whether the work succeeds on its own terms.
Your Review
The review form accompanies your invitation and guides you through each section. It asks you to consider two broad questions:
- Is the work sound? This includes its methods, evidence, and ethics, including community consent, benefit, and reciprocity consistent with the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.
- What does it contribute to understanding the Great Plains? This includes how it credits the knowledge holders and collaborators whose contributions it draws on.
Together, these questions reflect the criteria in GPR’s Statement of Publishing Ethics: clarity of purpose, contribution to regional knowledge, methodological transparency, and ethical practice.
Your recommendation is advice to the editor, who makes the final decision. Please do not state a recommendation in your comments to the authors. You will select one of four recommendations:
- Accept
- Accept with minor revisions
- Revisions required
- Reject
Manuscripts accepted with minor revisions do not return to peer review. If a manuscript is returned for revision, you may be invited to review the revised version, and the editor may add reviewers where subject-matter expertise warrants. A rejection most often reflects a manuscript’s fit with GPR’s mission and scope rather than a judgment of its quality; you are welcome to say so in your confidential comments to the editor.
Recognition
We deeply value the expertise and labor of our peer reviewers. In recognition of our small reviewer pool and our commitment to double-anonymous review integrity, we do not publish a list of contributing reviewers. We encourage all reviewers to recognize their service to GPR on their CV and professional portfolio.
Connect with Us
For questions or assistance during the review process, please contact us at gpr@unl.edu. Thank you for the care and expertise you bring to this work.