You don't necessarily need to have a PhD or other advanced degree but must have credentials to consider yourself a peer or expert in a specific subject area. Ideally, peer-reviewers have published in the subject are themselves, and have a methodological background in either quantitative or qualitative research methods
We do encourage reviews by laypeople and patients, but you need to disclose in your review what your level of expertise and background is.
Do not sign up as peer-reviewer if you have any conflicts of interest (note that we will treat any attempts by authors to sign up as reviewer under a false identity as scientific misconduct and reserve the right to promptly reject the article and inform the host institution). See How does JMIR define a Conflict of Interest (COI)?
Sign up as reviewer:
1. Create an account with JMIR Publications or login with your existing account.
Note: We strongly recommend reviewers to use an institutional email address. Additionally, we recommend reviewers to link their ORCiD identifier with their JMIR Publications account.
2. On your user homepage, select "Edit Profile"
3. Enter your review interests as keywords on the "My profile" user profile. An editor may use our reviewer database and invite you in the future to peer-review an article. If you fill in this box, you will automatically be checked off as a reviewer in your "roles" tab (see below).
Note: If you already received a peer-review invitation, you can also edit your review interests in the peer-review form (How does the JMIR peer-review form look like?).
4. If you don't want to enter specific reviewer interests but want to be invited to act as a reviewer, proceed to the "Roles" tab and check off the reviewer role. However, we highly recommend adding reviewer interests to ensure you are invited to review papers that are relevant to your area of expertise.
5. Alternatively, if you don't want to wait until an editor contacts you, browse our Preprints database to look for manuscript requiring a review and self-assign yourself to a manuscript by clicking the "Peer-Review Me" link (see also What is open peer-review?)
6. You can also find articles to review by going to a specific journal home page (ie, www.pediatrics.jmir.org). At the bottom of the page, you can see what articles submitted to that specific journal need reviewers.
Procedure
The standard turnaround time for reviews is currently 2 weeks, and the general aim is to give constructive feedback to the authors and/or to prevent publication of uninteresting or fatally flawed articles. Reviewers will be acknowledged by name if the article is published, but remain anonymous if the article is declined. If you are a peer-reviewer, please see What does the peer-review process at JMIR journals look like? for an in-depth overview of the peer-review process.
Related:
- How does the JMIR peer-review form look like?
- (for reviewers) How to write a high-quality peer review
- Other ways of becoming involved with JMIR Publications
- What is open peer-review?
- What are JMIR Preprints?
- Latest Submissions Open for Peer Review (Preprints)
- How does JMIR define a Conflict of Interest (COI)?