Reviewer guidelines

Journal of Plastic Surgery and Hand Surgery (JPHS)  uses single-anonymous review (also called single-blind peer review). This means that the reviewers’ names are not disclosed to the author, but the reviewer can see who the author is.

Competing interests

As a reviewer of JPHS you are expected to uphold the integrity of the peer review process, and hence a careful consideration of competing interests is important. As competing interests may introduce a perceived or actual bias in the peer review process they can compromise a study at a later stage, even if the study is perfectly valid. Competing interests can be financial or non-financial and they can be of a professional or personal character. They arise in relation to an organization or another person.

If you believe that you have competing interests, please contact the editors. The editors may ask you to review anyway or decide to find a different reviewer. In either case, it is important that the editor understands the nature of the competing interests, and can account for them when evaluating reviewer feedback.

Reviewer assessment

There are two main aims of the peer review: to assist in selecting papers suitable for publication in JPHS and to support the improvement of the manuscripts. We ask the reviewers to assess the quality, validity, and relevance of the manuscript at hand, and to motivate any major criticism conveyed to the authors. Your focus should thus be on the originality, presentation, and relevance to the readership of the journal and also on the accuracy of the methodology. More specifically, the reviewers will be asked to rate the paper concerning:

• Design and quality of data
• Methodology
• Adequate discussion and conclusion
• Importance of the study with respect to new information or valuable confirmation

We appreciate if you can also pay attention to the title of the manuscript, which is very important; it should be informative without being too long. The same goes for the abstract, as many readers will only read the title and abstract.

In your comments to the authors, we would like you to start with some general aspects and a short summary of your comments on the paper. You should not give recommendations on rejection or acceptance, leave that to the Editor. Then give major comments on the Abstract, Introduction, Methods and Materials, Results, and Discussion. Finally, give minor comments, on different parts of the manuscripts. However, if you consider the manuscript not suitable to publish, even after revision, you do not have to give too detailed comments to the authors. Comments to the Editor explaining your reasons for recommending Revision or Rejection are welcome and are treated confidentially as indicated in the review form.

Please note that JPHS is working hard trying to minimize the time to publication, in which the review process is a crucial factor. We will therefore urge you as a reviewer to let us know immediately if you are unable to review a manuscript or try to keep the deadline given to you. If you struggle to meet the deadline given, please let the editorial office know, so they can inform the author and update the system. It is often important to ask the authors to shorten their manuscript, trying to reduce the number of tables and figures and to limit the number of references.

We kindly ask the reviewer to pay special attention to the Tables and Figures. Please check that Tables and Figures are easy to read and understand and that they present new information rather than duplicating the text. Headings should include a non-technical description of the content. The heading for Table 1, typically presenting baseline characteristics, should include detailed data on the source of the study population, calendar year of study period, and intervention/exposure. Additional information on variables or statistical methods should be supplied in text below table/ Figure. Please ensure that survival curves, which are commonly used, include numbers at risk immediately below the x axis.”

Please know that the Editor may sometimes reject a paper in spite of the recommendations given by the reviewers, and we have to take the relevance of the paper into consideration.