Guidance for Peer Reviewers

All unpublished manuscripts are confidential documents. If we invite you to review an article and you choose to discuss the manuscript with a colleague, please remind them of the confidential nature of the paper and acknowledge their input in your review. You will also be asked to give your name and position, and any relevant competing interests in your report on any article we send you.

Reviewer’s score sheet

1- Major Compulsory Revisions:
The author must respond to these before a decision on publication can be reached. For example, additional necessary experiments or controls, statistical mistakes, errors in interpretation.

2- Minor Essential Revisions:
The author can be trusted to make these. For example, missing labels on figures, the wrong use of a term, spelling mistakes.

3- Discretionary Revisions:
These are recommendations for improvement which the author can choose to ignore. For example clarifications, data that would be useful but not essential.

4- Level of interest:

• An article of importance in its field
• An article whose findings is important to those with closely related research interests
• An article of limited interest

5- Assessment of the manuscript:

• Accept without revision
• Accept after discretionary revisions (which the authors can choose to ignore)
• Accept after minor essential revisions (which the authors can be trusted to make)
• Unable to decide on acceptance or rejection until the authors have responded to the major compulsory revisions
• Reject as not sufficiently sound

6- Declaration of competing interests

Please complete a declaration of competing interests, considering the following questions:

• 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?

If you can answer no to all of the above, write ‘I declare that I have no competing interests‘ below. If your reply is yes to any, please give details below.

Responding to a Request to Serve as a Reviewer

You will receive an e-mail that includes the manuscript abstract from an AJBM asking you to serve as a reviewer. The e-mail includes links with which to accept or decline the invitation. When you click (Agree) on the e-mail invitation you will receive an e-mail with a link to the AJBM website with full text of manuscript, and complete the review-scoring sheet.