How to conduct a review

Before accepting or declining an invitation to review, consider the following:

• Whether in accordance with your expertise.
• Do you have a conflict of interest?
• Do you have time to review?

If you accept to review, you should treat the manuscript and the results of your review as a confidential document. You are not allowed to share it with anyone without the permission of the editor. To do a review, the first time you need to read the entire article and give input in accordance with your point of view.

Your review report

Your review report will help the editor to determine whether a manuscript is eligible for publication or not. Your comment must be courteous and constructive. Providing feedback on manuscript weaknesses is important, you should clarify your judgment so that editors and authors can understand the reasons behind your comments.

Checklist

• Summarize the article in a short paragraph, to show that you have read and understood the research manuscript.
• Give your main impression of the article; what is new, makes interesting whether it makes enough impact and adds new knowledge.

• Make sure that all suggestions to the author to add specific that citations should be based on scientific reasons.

• Please inform the editor if you suspect plagiarism, fraud, or have other ethical concerns.

• Provide specific comments and suggestions, including layouts and formats, title, abstract, introduction, graphical abstracts and/or highlights, methods, statistical errors, results, discussions, conclusion, language, and references.

Your recommendation

Recommendations from reviewers are categorized as follows

• Reject (explain reason in report)
• Accept without revision
• Revise - either major or minor (explain the revision that is required)
• The final decision

Based on the reviewers report and recommendation, editors decide whether to accept or reject the article. The editors will weigh all views and may call for a third opinion if necessary.