Invitation to Join MedWeb Volunteer Reviewer Database
Benefits of MedWeb Volunteer Reviewers
Peer review is an essential part of the publication
process, ensuring that MedWeb Open Medicine maintains high-quality standards
for its published papers. Reviewing is often an unseen and unrewarded task. We
are striving to recognize the efforts of reviewers.
When reviewing for MedWeb journals you:
· Receive a discount entitling you to a reduction in
the article processing charge (APC) of a future submission to MedWeb Open
Medicine.
· Receive a personalized
reviewer certificate.
· Are included in the journal’s annual acknowledgment
of reviewers.
Invitation to Join MedWeb Volunteer Reviewer Database
If you are interested in reviewing articles for one
or more of our journals, please register your contact details, including your,
institutional affiliation, a short CV, and 5-6 keywords in line with your
expertise at the following page.
The managing editors of the selected journals will
send you a notification once approved.
Manuscripts submitted to MedWeb journals are
reviewed by at least two experts. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality
of the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the external editor on
whether a manuscript can be accepted, requires revisions or should be rejected.
We ask invited reviewers to:
· accept or decline any invitations quickly, based on
the manuscript title and abstract;
· suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must
be declined;
· request an extension in case more time is required
to compose a report;
· us know if anyone else, such as a student, will
participate in writing the review.
As part of the assessment,
reviewers will be asked:
· to rate the originality, significance, quality of the presentation,
scientific soundness, interest to the readers, overall merit, and English level
of the manuscript;
· to look at the reference list of the manuscript and
check if there are inappropriate self-citations;
· to provide an overall recommendation for the publication
of the manuscript;
· to provide a detailed, constructive review report;
Potential Conflicts of Interests
We ask reviewers to inform the journal editor if
they hold a conflict of interests that may prejudice the review report, either
in a positive or negative way. The editorial office will check as far as
possible before invitation, however we appreciate the cooperation of reviewers
in this matter. Reviewers who are invited to assess a manuscript they
previously reviewed for another journal should not consider this as a conflict
of interest in itself. In this case, reviewers should feel free to let us know
if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.
Reviewers should keep the content of the
manuscript, including the abstract, confidential. Reviewers must inform the
Editorial Office if they would like a student or colleague to complete the
review on their behalf.
MedWeb journals operate double blind peer review.
Reviewers should be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors, either
in their comments or in metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF
format.
Timely Review Reports
MedWeb aims to provide an efficient and high
quality publishing service to authors and to the scientific community. We ask
reviewers to assist by providing review reports in a timely manner. Please
contact the editorial office if you require an extension to the review
deadline.
Peer-Review and Editorial Procedure
All manuscripts sent for publication in our
journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts (this includes
research and review articles, spontaneous submissions, and invited papers). The
Managing Editor of the journal will perform an initial check of the
manuscript’s suitability upon receipt. The Editorial Office will then organize
the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least
two review reports per manuscript. We ask our authors for adequate revisions
(with a second round of peer-review if necessary) before a final decision is
made. The final decision is made by the academic editor (usually the
Editor-in-Chief/Editorial Board Member of a journal or the Guest Editor of a
Special Issue). Accepted articles are copy-edited and English-edited.
Please rate the following aspects of the
manuscript:
· Originality/Novelty: Is the question original and well defined? Do the results provide
an advance in current knowledge?
· Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant?
Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses and
speculations carefully identified as such?
· Quality of Presentation: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and
analyses presented appropriately? Are the highest standards for presentation of
the results used?
· Scientific Soundness: is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the
analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Are the data robust
enough to draw conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents
described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the
results?
· Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the Journal?
Will the paper attract a wide readership, or be of interest only to a limited
number of people? (please see the Aims and Scope of the journal)
· Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work
provide an advance towards the current knowledge? Do the authors have addressed
an important long-standing question with smart experiments?
· English Level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?
Manuscripts submitted to MedWeb
journals should meet the highest standards of publication ethics:
· Manuscripts should only report results that have
not been submitted or published before, even in part.
· Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse
text from another source without appropriate citation.
· For biological studies, the studies reported should
have been carried out in accordance with generally accepted ethical research
standards.
If reviewers become aware of such scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism, or any other unethical behavior related to the manuscript, they should raise
these concerns with the in-house editor immediately.
Please provide an overall recommendation for the
publication of the manuscript as follows:
· Accept
in Present Form: The paper
is accepted without any further changes.
· Accept
after Minor Revisions: The paper
is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments.
Authors are given five days for minor revisions.
· Reconsider
after Major Revisions: The
acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to
provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the
reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. Usually, only one round of major
revisions is allowed. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper
within ten days and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for
further comments.
· Reject: The article has serious flaws, makes no
original contribution, and the paper is rejected with no offer of resubmission
to the journal.
Note that your recommendation is visible only to
journal editors, not to the authors.
We have listed some general instructions regarding
the review report for your consideration. Please find these below.
To begin with, please consider the following
guidelines:
· Read the whole article as well as the supplementary
material, if there is any, paying close attention to the figures, tables, data, and methods.
· Your report should critically analyze the article
as a whole but also specific sections and the key concepts presented in the
article.
· Please ensure your comments are detailed so that
the authors may better understand and address the points you raise.
· Reviewers must not recommend excessive citation of
their work (self-citations), another author’s work (honorary citations) or
articles from the journal where the manuscript was submitted as a means of
increasing the citations of the reviewer/authors/journal. You can provide
references as needed, but they must clearly improve the quality of the
manuscript under review.
· Please maintain a neutral tone and focus on
providing constructive criticism that will help the authors improve their work.
Derogatory comments will not be tolerated.
Note that MedWeb journals follow several standards
and guidelines, including those from the ICMJE (medical journals), CONSORT
(trial reporting), TOP (data transparency and openness), PRISMA (systematic
reviews and meta-analyses) and ARRIVE (reporting of in vivo experiments).
Reviewers that are familiar with the guidelines should report any concerns they
have about their implementation.
For further guidance on writing a critical review,
please refer to the following documents:
1. COPE Ethical Guidelines for
Peer Reviewers. Committee on Publication Ethics. Available online.
2. Hames, I. Peer Review and Manuscript
Management in Scientific Journals: Guidelines for Good Practice.
Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, UK, 2007.
3. Writing a journal article
review. Australian National University: Canberra,
Australia, 2010. Available online.
4. Golash-Boza, T. How to write a peer review
for an academic journal: Six steps from start to finish. Available online.
Review reports should contain the following:
· A brief summary (one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper, its main
contributions and strengths.
· General
concept comments
Article: highlighting areas of weakness, the
testability of the hypothesis, methodological inaccuracies, missing controls,
etc.
Review: commenting on the completeness of the
review topic covered, the relevance of the review topic, the gap in knowledge
identified, the appropriateness of references, etc.
These comments are focused on the scientific
content of the manuscript and should be specific enough for the authors to be
able to respond.
· Specific comments referring to line numbers, tables or figures that point out
inaccuracies within the text or sentences that are unclear. These comments
should also focus on the scientific content and not on spelling, formatting or
English language problems, as these can be addressed at a later stage by our
internal staff.
General questions to help guide your review report
for research articles
· Is the manuscript clear, relevant for the field, and
presented in a well-structured manner?
· Are the cited references current (mostly within the
last 5 years)? Does it include an abnormal number of self-citations?
· Is the manuscript scientifically sound and is the
experimental design appropriate to test the hypothesis?
· Are the manuscript’s results reproducible based on
the details given in the methods section?
· Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate?
Do they properly show the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand? Are
the data interpreted appropriately and consistently throughout the manuscript?
Please include details regarding the statistical analysis or data acquired from
specific databases.
· Are the conclusions consistent with the evidence
and arguments presented?
· Please evaluate the ethics statements and data
availability statements to ensure they are adequate.
General questions to help guide your review report
for review articles
· Is the review clear, comprehensive, and of relevance
to the field? Is a gap in knowledge identified?
· Was a similar review published recently and, if
yes, is this current review still relevant and of interest to the scientific
community?
· Are the cited references current (mostly within the
last 5 years)? Are any citations omitted? Does it include an abnormal number of
self-citations?
· Are the statements and conclusions drawn coherent
and supported by the listed citations?
· Are the figures/tables/images/schemes appropriate?
Do they properly show the data? Are they easy to interpret and understand?