Review Reports

The review report must be prepared in English. We have listed some general instructions regarding the review report.

2.1 Theguidelines:

• Read the whole paper as well as the supplementary material, if there is any, paying close attention to the figures, tables, data, and methods.

• Report should critically analyze the paperas whole but also specific sections and the key concepts presented in the paper.

• Please ensure your comments in detail so that the authors may correctly understand and address the points you raise.

• Citation of work must not be recommended by themselves, close colleagues, another author, or the journal when it is not clearly necessary to improve the quality of the manuscript under review.

• Citation must not be recommended of own 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.

• AI or AI-assisted tools (such as ChatGPT) are prohibited to draft, edit, polish or review submissions in order to produce peer review reports. Reviewers are solely responsible for the content of their reports, and the utilization of AI or AI-assisted tools to assist any part of the report preparation process constitutes a breach of peer review confidentiality and comes with additional copyright, security and confidentiality risks.

If the review report does not meet our quality standards of SMR, you may be asked to revise the report, or the report may also be discarded.

2.2 Review reports should contain the following:

• A brief summary (one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper, its main contributions and strengths.

• Article/ Paper: 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.

2.3 General questions to help ton prepare the review report for research articles:

• Is the manuscript clear, relevant for the field and presented in a well-structured manner? 

• Are the cited references mostly recent publications (within the last 5 years) and relevant? Does it include an excessive 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 adequacy.

The content of the review report will be rated by an Academic Editor from a scientific point of view as well as general usefulness to the improvement of the manuscript. The overall grading results will be used as a reference for potential promotion of Reviewer Board Members, Volunteer Reviewers and regular Reviewers.