Information for reviewers

We have collated the following resources to support and guide you in reviewing for us. We greatly appreciate the time and support reviewers give to the peer review process.

In our invitation, we will include the title of the paper, authors' names, and the paper’s abstract. Before accepting our invitation to review a manuscript, consider these questions:

• Is the topic and methodology of the manuscript within your expertise?
• Do you feel confident assessing this paper? Please keep in mind that it is reasonable to accept a review invitation even when your expertise is limited to a subset of the study. In these instances, please indicate in your review which aspects of the study you assessed.
• Do you have any potential conflicts of interest? For example, is an author at your institution or have you co-published with them?
• Do you have time? Before or after agreeing to review, if you need an extension to the deadline, please contact us by replying to our email invitation to let us know how long you may need.

We understand how busy you are with other commitments and may not be available to review. Declining our invite lets us know that we need to contact alternative reviewers and helps us keep the manuscript evaluation process efficient. If you decline our invitation, we would be grateful if you could provide suggestions for experts we might consider as alternative reviewers.

We ask reviewers to provide our Editors with the information they need to constructively and fairly make a decision on a manuscript and guide authors on how they can strengthen their manuscript to the point where it might be acceptable for publication. 

We ask that reviewers do not assess the importance or significance of a paper - the research community will make this judgement after publication. The review should consider the following questions:

• Is the paper technically sound?
• Are the claims fully supported by the experimental data? If not, what further evidence is needed?
• Is the statistical analysis of the data sound?
• Does the availability of data adhere to the expected standards of your research community?
• Are the claims appropriately discussed in the context of previous literature?
• Could the manuscript be revised to address any potential limitations?

Preparing your report

Reviews must be submitted by completing our structured report on our submission system. When preparing your report, it may help to start with a brief summary of the manuscript and your overall impression of the work, noting both strengths and weaknesses. Explaining your recommendations will help the authors to understand your reasoning and will help them improve their work prior to publication (either in this journal or elsewhere). It is helpful to separate your comments into major issues (changes that you think are required or essential) and minor issues (changes that may be discretionary or where small clarifications or additional details may be needed).

If you do recommend rejection of the manuscript, please detail your concerns (for example, no valid research question, flaws with the methodology or interpretation of results); your feedback will allow the authors to understand your decision and improvements they may need to make to this and future manuscripts. 

You will also be able to provide separate comments to the Editor, for example, any ethical concerns or other issues you believe the Editor should be aware of, or if there are parts of the manuscript you could not assess (e.g. the statistical analyses used).

Before you submit your report, please take a moment to read it through and put yourself in the place of the authors. How would you feel if you received this report? Would you find the tone courteous and professional?

Revised manuscript

If the Editor’s decision is to ask the authors to revise their manuscript, we may contact you again to assess the revised manuscript to ensure that you are satisfied with the response to your concerns and the changes made to the manuscript. If you have outstanding concerns on the revisions made, you can raise these to the authors, but please keep in mind that your feedback should be consistent between the rounds of review. If you believe the paper is now acceptable for publication, you can recommend acceptance.