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Twelve academic critics (interested in the management of academic journals) have been invited to partake in the composition of this editorial. They have engaged in three main rounds to craft standards for journals. Five holistic standards have been manufactured, each one consisting of measurable key performance indicators. The first is human potential, which discusses, for instance, the representation of genders among editorial board members and reviewers. The second is ethics, for example, problematising the practice of judging articles and journals merely based on their ability to attract citations, and thus make a so-called ‘impact’. The third is regulations, deeming it necessary to ensure transparency and protect authors' rights (e.g. by publishing the expected time from submission to first decisions). The fourth is digital quality, such as the online publication of manuscripts right after their acceptance. The fifth is technical sophistication, including the availability of regularly published statistics on the journal’s workflow. This editorial has three strong points: first, it discusses the proposed standards by comparing them with existing standards imposed by major organisations (namely Scopus and Clarivate); second, it sheds light on potential challenges that may be encountered when exposing Arab journals to the proposed standards, hoping that these standards act as a starting point for a fundamental reform in Arab journals; third, it evaluates the Scientific Journal of King Faisal University according to the proposed standards, thereby empirically testing out these standards.

This is a perspective article that presents the author's vision in a critically reflective manner about the urgent need and necessity to incorporate 'creativity values' into teacher preparation programs, especially in such an era (i.e. the 21 st century) when new types of skills, knowledge and values are needed beyond the traditional ones which originate from previous centuries.

This editorial problematises the field of giftedness in the Arab world, with the intention of taking all those involved outside their ‘comfort zone’. First, it is advised that Arabs should stop being submissive followers of Western literature (and thus remaining in an inferior cognitive position) and should rather be proactive and leading contributors to worldviews. Second, research on Arab giftedness should be contextualised and ‘culturalised’ by investigating the long-overlooked Arab-specific influences on gifted people. Third, there is a need to tackle the issue of ‘word stuffing’ and to instead promote efficiency in academic writing, bearing in mind that Arab academic writers habitually employ many words and sentences that contain few or even no meanings. Fourth, awareness campaigns and regulations should be initiated to restrict the deeply rooted ‘copy-and-paste’ culture, whereby many Arab academics copy (frankly, steal) from one another, resulting in considerable plagiarism and repetition. Fifth, researchers should dare to expose the field (and their datasets) to the cultural ‘taboo’ of genuinely critically reflective thinking. Sixth, it needs to be accepted that giftedness practitioners lack qualifications, as a result of which they tend to act spontaneously, with no academic basis. Seventh, some Arab institutions display an interest in the nurture of gifted students not for the sake of the gifted themselves but rather to look ‘cool’ and to polish their own public image. Eighth, the ideologically intense nature of the wider culture leads many researchers to emphasise certainty and ‘truth’, even though ‘doubt’ is the bedrock of academia. Last, giftedness should be institutionalised in tertiary education (as is the case in secondary education); as things stand, gifted university students miss out on the nurture they experienced at secondary school. It is hoped that these nine points will be regarded as a starting point for the philosophical foundation of an ‘Arab Critical School of Thought’.