Reviewer Responsibilities

Reviewers play an essential role in maintaining the scientific quality, integrity, fairness, and credibility of the journal’s peer-review process. Reviewers are expected to provide independent, objective, constructive, evidence-based, and timely evaluations of manuscripts within their areas of expertise.

Reviewers must:

• accept a review assignment only when they have sufficient expertise to evaluate the manuscript and can complete the review within the agreed timeframe;
• provide accurate information about their identity, qualifications, institutional affiliation, and areas of expertise and must never impersonate another person or provide false reviewer information;
• disclose any financial, professional, institutional, personal, intellectual, or other competing interests that could affect, or reasonably appear to affect, the impartiality of their assessment and decline the review when an appropriate independent assessment cannot be provided;
• treat the manuscript, supplementary materials, reviewer reports, and all information obtained during peer review as strictly confidential;
• not share the manuscript or involve another person in the review without prior permission from the journal; where authorized assistance is provided, the contributor must be disclosed to the editor;
• not contact authors directly concerning a manuscript without authorization from the journal;
• provide a fair, objective, constructive, respectful, and scientifically reasoned review, avoiding personal criticism, discriminatory comments, hostile language, or unsupported allegations;
• assess, as appropriate, the manuscript’s originality, scientific relevance, study design, methodology, statistical analysis, validity of results, interpretation, reporting quality, conclusions, references, and compliance with relevant ethical requirements;
• identify significant scientific, methodological, reporting, or ethical concerns and alert the editor to suspected plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabrication, falsification, inappropriate data or image manipulation, citation manipulation, unethical research, or other potential misconduct;
• recommend additional references only when they are genuinely relevant to the scientific assessment and must not request unnecessary citations to their own work, the journal, or other publications for the purpose of increasing citation counts;
• not use unpublished data, ideas, methods, results, or other confidential information obtained through peer review for personal research, professional advantage, competitive benefit, or the benefit or disadvantage of another person;
• comply with the journal’s policy on artificial intelligence and AI-assisted technologies. Reviewers must not upload manuscripts, supplementary files, or confidential review materials to external AI systems where confidentiality cannot be assured. Any permitted substantive use of AI in preparing a review must be disclosed to the journal and remains the reviewer’s responsibility;
• promptly inform the editor if, after accepting an invitation, they discover that they lack the necessary expertise, identify a conflict of interest, recognize a possible author in a double-anonymous review in a way that may compromise impartiality, or cannot complete the review within the agreed timeframe;
• submit their evaluation independently and must not attempt to manipulate the editorial decision, peer-review process, authorship, or citation practices.

Reviewers provide recommendations rather than final editorial decisions. The final decision on acceptance, revision, or rejection remains with the Editor-in-Chief or an appropriately authorized editor.

The journal expects reviewers to follow the principles of confidentiality, impartiality, professional responsibility, transparency, and research integrity reflected in recognized guidance for scholarly and medical peer review. ICMJE specifically requires reviewers to maintain manuscript confidentiality, declare relationships and activities that may bias the review, recuse themselves where conflicts exist, respond promptly, and provide constructive and respectful reviews. It also requires reviewers to obtain journal permission before using AI to facilitate a review and to protect confidential manuscript information. COPE guidance similarly emphasizes reviewer expertise, accurate identity, competing-interest disclosure, timeliness, confidentiality, impartiality, and prohibition on unauthorized delegation or direct author contact.