How does the PLoS Medicine review process work?
Image: Brendon Bannon
As fully explained in the Guidelines for Reviewers on the journal site, each manuscript submitted to PLoS Medicine is assigned to one of the PLoS Medicine Editors. This professional editor will then consult an externally-based Academic Editor with expertise in the relevant area, typically a member of our Editorial Board, and if it is thought that the manuscript represents a major advance in that field with a sufficient body of work to support that claim it will be sent out to peer review.
We do ask authors to suggest reviewers to include and exclude when they submit a manuscript, but typically the reviewers selected will be selected on the basis of the experience of the professional editor and the recommendations of the Academic Editor. As a result of the reviewers’ comments, the PLoS Medicine Editor in consultation with the Academic Editor will arrive at a decision to either accept, accept with minor revision, recommend major revision or reject the manuscript.
The reviewers who helped us in 2007 and 2008 are thanked on the following pages: 2007 reviewer thanks; 2008 reviewer thanks.
Tips on writing and submitting the Review
The questions to consider for the best possible review of Research Articles are outlined in the Reviewer Guidelines, as are the different questions to consider for Magazine section pieces, along with other questions to consider.
Reviewers submit their reviews through our online submission site. Some of the things we recommend reviewers to look out for when using the system include:
- Look out for all manuscript information! We ask authors to provide a declaration of competing interests and a funding statement in the article file, but you can also find them on the manuscript page in the submission system. In your prefer to print the document rather than reading the paper online we recommend printing out the online manuscript information as well as the PDF of the article itself.
- Marking up the manuscript: Some reviewers like to provide a marked up copy of the manuscript they are reviewing with their comments added. Please feel free to do this but it helps us if you convert the marked up document to a PDF file rather than uploading it as a Word document. If you have any questions about this, feel free to ask the publications team for help via plosmedicine@plos.org.
- Be timely with your review! Typically we ask reviewers to send their comments about the manuscript within 14 days of accepting the offer to review. If you realise that you going to take longer than this, please let us know. You can do this through the submission site (if you login to the site you’ll see that there is the option to request more time to review) but you can also contact plosmedicine@plos.org with an outline of how much extra time you need.
- Confidentiality, Anonymity and Competing Interests: As requested in the Reviewer Guidelines we ask reviewers to keep their reviews confidential. When you submit your review you will see that the default setting is to pass on the reviewer’s name to the authors along with all reviewer comments. PLoS Medicine encourages open peer review but if you prefer to remain anonymous, please select this option on the review form. You will also be asked to declare any competing interests when submitting your review.
- Be prepared to re-review! We frequently invite reviewers who have provided input on the original submission of a paper to review it after it has been revised. We greatly appreciate it if reviewers are prepared to review
Contributing to discussion after a paper is published:
Remember, you can comment, rate and add notes to any published PLoS Medicine paper. We encourage reviewers to participate in the discussion of any paper that they review that is subsequently published (as long as they make it clear that they reviewed the paper) and any other papers published by PLoS Medicine.
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