The members of the scientific community who serve as peer reviewers for Journal of Medical Discovery (JMD) are essential to ensuring the quality of the articles published in the journal. They perform an invaluable service to the entire community of science and medicine. Scientific and medical progress depends on the communication of information that can be trusted, and the peer review process is a vital part of that system. Peer reviewers should provide an objective critical evaluation of the paper in the broadest terms practicable.
Research Article, Reviews, Commentaries and Case Report submitted to JMD are reviewed in depth, at least two outside referees are consulted. Reviewers need to make a recommendation to the Editor-in-Chief. We only ask the original reviewers of a manuscript to re-review the revised version if we believe the paper has been significantly improved. The final responsibility for decisions of acceptance or rejection of submitted manuscripts lies with the editors.
Peer reviewers should also indicate if the manuscript requires its English grammar, punctuation or spelling to be corrected. All submissions are reviewed for scientific accuracy, clarity, and conciseness of presentation. The reviewers are preferred to fill the Reviewers’ comments form and sent it back to editor@e-discoverypublication.com.
Review Criteria
The reviewers should
- Disinterested evaluation. Reviews should be objective assessments of the research. Declare all potential conflicting interests, you should describe them in your confidential comments. Reviews should not be influenced by the origins of a manuscript, by the nationality, religious or political beliefs, gender or other characteristics of the authors, or by commercial considerations.
- Considerate, useful comments. Reviews should be constructive and courteous. The reviewer should refrain from being hostile or inflammatory and from making libelous or derogatory personal comments.
- Timeliness. Please return your reviews within 14 days when you were asked to review the paper. If events will prevent a timely review, please inform the editor at the time of the request.
- Confidentiality. Respect the confidentiality of peer review and not reveal any details of a manuscript or its review, during or after the peer-review process, beyond those that are released by the journal. Do not use information obtained during the peer-review process for making personal or professional use before publication without the authors’ specific permission (unless you are writing an editorial or commentary to accompany the article).
- Anonymity.The review process is conducted anonymously; we never reveal the identity of reviewers to authors. The privacy and anonymity provisions of this process extend to the reviewer, who should only reveal his or her identity with the author, and possibly with other reviewers and our Board and only after the review.
- Editorial Policies. You should be aware of Journal of Medical Discovery‘s policies or authors regarding conflict of interest, data availability, and materials sharing.
- If, as a reviewer, you believe that you are not qualified to evaluate a component of the research, you should inform the editor in your review.
Publication Criteria
The reviewers should evaluate the articles and provide an overall recommendation based on the importance of the work, the technical soundness and the novelty. And if the article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.
Overall Recommendation: On the basis of the mission statement above, recommend whether the paper should be published in Journal of Medical Discovery and provide a more detailed critique based on the following:
- Importance: Evaluate whether the conclusions are of substantial importance to the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of diseases. The basic researches should provide with novel points for the mechanism of diseases.
- Technical Rigor: Evaluate whether, or to what extent, the data and methods substantiate the conclusions and interpretations. If appropriate, indicate what additional data and information are needed to validate the conclusions or support the interpretations.
- Novelty: Indicate in your review whether the conclusions are novel and how they relate to work already published. However, of course, results reported should not have been published elsewhere.
Conflict of Interest
Please disclose the conflict of interest at the time of submitting your reviewer comments, considering the following questions. If you can answer no to all of the above, write ‘I declare that I have no competing interests’.
- Have you in the past five years received reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of this manuscript, either now or in the future?
- Do you hold any stocks or shares in an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of this manuscript, either now or in the future?
- Do you hold or are you currently applying for any patents relating to the content of the manuscript?
- Have you received reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript?
- Do you have any other financial competing interests?
- Do you have any non-financial competing interests in relation to this paper?
Publication policy and ethical considerations
In spite of our best efforts to identify breaches of publication policy or ethical conduct (such as plagiarism or author conflict of interest), reviewers are more likely to recognize an inconsistency or error and should alert the Editor to any potential problem.
