JMIR has recently revised its peer-review form (and will keep revising it). Below is a screenshot of the basic elements of a peer-review form after the reviewer has accepted the review request.
- Nominated Reviewers will find a link to the peer-review form in the first line of the review request email (and all reminders).
- Reviewers do not have to login to complete a review - the link contains a secret key, thus it does not require a login. Therefore, the email / URL should not be shared with third parties. See also I was asked to review but cannot login
JMIR Publications adheres to the guidelines set out by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and expects reviewers to be familiar with these peer reviewing guidelines and follow them to avoid any likelihood of reviewer misconduct.
If you have never done a peer-review before, we recommend to consult some resources on the Internet on that topic, e.g.
- How to Write a Peer-Review (External Link to Publons)
- Ten tips for a truly terrible peer review (Elsevier)
At JMIR Publications, you will earn up to 100 Karma credits ($100) for a review which you can spend for your own submissions or other perks (see Karma Credits - What are they and how to collect them?)
Note that filling in optional fields with the blue Karma icon will give you more Karma points. For example, you may want to add your ORCID (What is an ORCID?), or suggest additional reviewers (for which we award 2 Karma points per reviewer, up to 4 points).
The most important fields for the reviewer (other than the narrative review for the author and editor) are to rate the priority (importance) of paper in terms of projected impact, as well as to indicate how much revision will be required to achieve that impact, on a scale from A to E (see below).
Reviewers can also suggest other reviewers, and can suggest a transfer to other JMIR journals if the paper seems in principle publishable but is perhaps out of scope or too weak for the target journal (see What does "Suggest Transfer" [to another JMIR journal] on the review form mean?).
All reviewer comments are recommendations only. The final decision rests with the editor. Editors are by no means obligated to get final approval from all reviewers. It is actually a common situation that different reviewers have different views on a paper in which case the final decision rests with the editor.
Reviewers will be invited to re-review the revision unless they rate the paper A or B, or unless they indicate that they are not available or unwilling to rereview the paper.
Possible reviewer recommendations:
- A-accept (almost never after the first review round)
- B-minor revisions required (no further formal external peer-review round required, reviewer will not see the revision, editor makes decision)
- C-revise & rereview (reviewer invited for re-review if revision is submitted)
- D-major revisions & rereview* (reviewer invited for re-review if revision is submitted)
- E-reject* (reviewer invited for re-review if revision is submitted)
*Reviewers are encouraged to make a suggestion for a journal transfer or comment on whether for example the paper can be converted to a formative evaluation or protocol paper e.g. for JMIR Research Protocols
See also:
- What does "Suggest Transfer" [to another JMIR journal] on the review form mean?
- I was asked to peer-review but cannot find the full paper
- As a reviewer, where do I find other reviewer comments and the authors' responses to the previous reviewer comments?
- I peer-reviewed a paper for JMIR but don't know where to upload my tracked changes file
- How does the peer-review process at JMIR journals look like?