Reviewer Guidelines
Healthcare Issues uses a single-blind peer-review process. Reviewers remain anonymous to authors, while the identity of authors is available to reviewers.
Peer review should provide an objective, constructive, confidential, and scientifically informed assessment of each manuscript.
Reviewer Qualifications
Reviewers should accept assignments only when they have appropriate subject expertise, methodological knowledge, or relevant professional experience to evaluate the manuscript.
For medical and healthcare manuscripts, reviewers should have sufficient expertise in the relevant clinical, biomedical, public-health, epidemiological, laboratory, methodological, or related subject area.
Reviewer Responsibilities
- Assess the originality, scientific quality, relevance, and methodological soundness of the manuscript.
- Assess whether the conclusions are supported by the results and evidence presented.
- Identify important methodological, statistical, reporting, or scientific concerns.
- Consider whether ethical requirements applicable to the research have been addressed.
- Provide clear, constructive, specific, and evidence-based comments.
- Maintain confidentiality throughout the review process.
- Declare actual, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest.
- Inform the editor of suspected plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabrication, falsification, or other integrity concerns.
Research Ethics
Reviewers should consider whether manuscripts involving human participants, patient information, human biological materials, medical records, or animals provide appropriate ethical information.
Where relevant, reviewers should consider whether the manuscript appropriately addresses ethics approval, informed consent, participant privacy, clinical trial registration, and animal welfare.
Scientific and Reporting Standards
Reviewers should assess whether the manuscript provides sufficient methodological information to support understanding, evaluation, and reproducibility of the reported work.
Where appropriate, reviewers may consider recognized reporting standards such as CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA, CARE, ARRIVE, STARD, COREQ, and SRQR. The EQUATOR Network Reporting Guidelines Library may be used as a reference.
Conflicts of Interest
Reviewers must disclose any actual, potential, or perceived conflict of interest. A reviewer should decline an assignment when a relationship or interest could reasonably affect impartiality.
Potential conflicts may include personal relationships, recent collaboration, institutional relationships, financial interests, academic competition, or other circumstances that could influence the review.
Confidentiality
Manuscripts, data, figures, supplementary materials, and peer-review correspondence are confidential. Reviewers must not share, copy, distribute, publicly discuss, or use unpublished manuscript information without editorial permission.
Use of Artificial Intelligence
Reviewers must not upload confidential manuscript content, unpublished data, figures, or peer-review information into generative AI systems or external tools where confidentiality cannot be assured.
Reviewers should follow the ICMJE guidance on Artificial Intelligence in Publishing.
Reviewer Comments
Reviewer comments should be professional, objective, and relevant to the scientific assessment of the manuscript. Personal criticism of authors is inappropriate.
Reviewers should distinguish between major concerns that affect the validity or interpretation of the work and minor issues that can be corrected during revision.
Recommendation
Reviewers may recommend:
- Acceptance
- Minor Revision
- Major Revision
- Rejection
Reviewer recommendations are advisory. The final editorial decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief or a formally designated editor acting under delegated editorial authority.
Publication Ethics
Reviewers should follow recognized publication-ethics principles, including the COPE Core Practices.