Reviewer guidelines
The working instructions for a JPBS review report. Read them before you accept an invitation.
The reviewer’s role
You are asked for a reasoned report on an anonymised manuscript. You are not asked to copy-edit, to guarantee the paper, or to decide publication. The editor reads your report alongside others and decides.
Before you accept
Check the anonymised title and the article type against your expertise. If the statistics or a specialised assay are outside what you can judge, say which parts you can cover. It is better to decline than to guess.
Check competing interests. If a conflict exists, decline and name it. If a milder relationship exists, tell the editor and wait for an instruction.
Time
The invitation states a deadline. JPBS has not published a median time to review; the deadline on the invitation is the working date. If you need longer, ask before the date passes. Silence is worse than a decline.
What to assess
Fit to the journal is mainly an editorial question; flag it if the work is clearly out of scope. Your report should concentrate on the science:
- Is the question stated, and is it the question the data address?
- Are the methods sufficient to repeat the work?
- Do the results support the claims, including in the abstract and the title?
- Are limitations, sample size and uncertainty reported?
- For human or animal work: are ethics and consent stated, or is their absence explained?
- Is prior work cited where a claim depends on it?
The report
Comments to authors should be numbered and specific. Quote or locate the passage. Distinguish errors that change the conclusion from optional improvements.
Confidential comments to the editor are for process: a suspected identity breach, a competing interest you discovered late, a concern about image integrity, or a recommendation you do not want to put on the author letter. Do not use that box to be unkind in private.
The recommendation
Accept — the manuscript can be published with at most trivial corrections.
Minor revision — the claims stand; specific, bounded changes are needed.
Major revision — the claims might stand if substantial further work or rewriting is done; the editor may still reject.
Reject — the methods do not support the claims, or the faults cannot be repaired in this manuscript.
Revisions
If the editor sends a revision back to you, check whether the essential points were addressed. Do not open a new line of optional experiments unless a new claim has appeared. The editor may decide a revision without sending it out again.