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Once articles are submitted, the managing editor conducts an initial review to ensure the manuscript meets all submission guidelines.
HPHR‘s maintains a pool of several hundred peer reviewers, all experts in clinical and behavioral medicine and/or public health. All are heavily vetted and trained to ensure the highest quality assessments, ensuring that each submission aligns with HPHR’s mission and vision (scope and aims).
All peer reviewers must:
While extensive, this selection process ensures that HPHR Journal editors have access to optimal guidance in selecting articles for publication. It also ensures that all authors receive the best feedback to improve their piece, even in those instances where a submission is rejected.
Reviewers are obliged to abide by the principles and standards described below, which align with the Committee on Publication Ethics Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, which also provides further information producing objective and constructive reviews. Peer reviewers who join HPHR acknowledge and agree to these conditions.
Peer reviewers who submit at least 4 exemplary reviews may be invited and/or inquire about joining the HPHR Editorial Board. New editorial board members generally start as associate editors and then work their way to the senior ranks of deputy and managing editor.
Extensive details about becoming an editor and reviewer are available here.
Peer reviewers are required to declare all known and/or potentially conflicting or competing interests (e.g. personal, scholarly, financial, intellectual, professional, political, religious, etc.). This ensures that articles can be assigned to impartial reviewers. Peer reviewers are asked to immediately notify the editor in charge of the manuscript in the event of any objections or conflicts of interest. They also are expressly forbidden from accepting a review to gain an edge in the science without the intention to submit a review.
Manuscripts are the authors’ private, confidential property. Peer reviewers are expected to keep manuscripts and the information they contain strictly confidential. If you do choose to discuss the manuscript and/or your review with a professional colleague whose input you request as part of your review process, you are responsible for ensuring that they are made fully aware of the confidential nature of the discussion and that they must not disclose any information about the manuscript until the article is published. The identity of any co-reviewer and any potential conflicting or competing interests they may have must be disclosed when submitting your review. Reviewers should not retain the manuscript for personal use and should destroy copies after submitting their review.
Peer reviewers must accept only manuscripts that they know they can return within the proposed or agreed-upon time-frame. If they are unable to provide a review, they are invited to suggest alternate reviewers, based on their expertise and apart from any personal influence or benefit.
Peer reviewers are required to indicate any concerns about potential misconduct by authors in relation to research or writing and submission of the manuscript. These concerns may include:
In the event of these or other concerns, peer reviewers are to alert the editor reviewing the manuscript. The editor, in turn, will contact HPHR‘s editors-in-chief, who will conduct an investigation of any misconduct and confer with the authors to clear up any matters.
HPHR immediately rejects all articles suspected or confirmed scientific misconduct.
Peer reviewers are expected to provide unbiased, expert assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript, offering clear feedback toward its improvement. In addition to guidance to strengthening a manuscript, reviewers are invited to submit in depth markup of reviewed articles.
Critiques must provide specific guidance, such as indicating where authors need to provide additional and/or ore up-t0-date references.
Language should be professional, supportive, and insightful. Defamation, hostile language, and other inflammatory language are expressly forbidden.
Peer reviewers are welcome to leverage AI to augment their review of pieces; however, they must indicate so in their note to the editor and authors. Content and identifying details from the articles themselves should be processed in AI tools, however, to preserve the confidentiality of authors’ work.
HPHR reviews are single-blind, meaning that authors have access to authors’ details, but authors do not know who served as their peer reviewer. All peer review feedback, including manuscript markups, is provided to the authors at the time of author notification.
All author and peer review queries are submitted via Scholastica to to the author managing the manuscript. Authors and peer reviewers should not communicate directly.
Peer reviewers are to contact the editor overseeing the piece in the event of any potential publication ethics concerns.
As noted previously, peer reviewers’ identities are kept confidential. The entirety of their reviews are forwarded in their entirety to the authors, with the exception of any private comments and/or concerns shared with the editor.
Peer reviews are expected to be civil and constructive; editors reserve the right to edit or remove inappropriate commentary.
Authors are given the option of identifying potential peer reviewers for their submissions. These suggested reviewers must be appropriate subject matter experts and may not be close colleagues and/or other persons with potential conflicts of interest. HPHR reserves the right to accept or ignore these suggested reviewers.
We do not restrict the use you make of your review once the manuscript has been published. However, an author’s manuscript remains confidential until it is published, and you must not disclose any information about an unpublished manuscript, including your review of it.
Please note that if the article is NOT published you may refer to the journal which requested your review and the fact that you have reviewed an article for it. However, you may not post any details of the article which was reviewed, or any part of the review that would breach the confidentiality under which the article was provided to you for review.
Peer reviewers’ details are maintained in Scholastica, the platform used for managing manuscripts, peer reviews, and author notifications. Peer reviewers have a profile on Scholastica that includes their name, subject matter expertise, and organizational affilitation. If you ever wish to opt-out, email us at communications@bcph.org and your profile on Scholastica will be removed.
To reach HPHR, contact us at:
Boston Congress of Public Health
Publisher of HPHR Journal
5511 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 1040
Hollywood, CA 90028
www.BCPH.org
communications@bcph.org
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Visit HPHR’s publisher, the Boston Congress of Public Health (BCPH).
Email communications@bcph.org for more information.
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