 Now let's talk about two types of review. The two types are called blinded and unblinded reviews. Blinded review means that you as the reviewer do not know the name of the author and the author will never know who reviewed the paper. In nursing, most often we use blinded reviews. So what are the pros and cons of blinded reviews? One of the pros is that there's no bias by the reviewer because the reviewer does not know who the author is. It's only after the paper is published that the name of the author is actually revealed. So we hope by doing blinded review there's no bias from the reviewer who may already know that author. However the risk of a blinded review is that sometimes reviewers can make very cruel and unkind and unprofessional comments about a paper because they know their name will never be revealed. What I would encourage is when you do a review, a blinded review, write your comments as if your name would be revealed. Don't hide behind anonymity and make very inappropriate unprofessional remarks to an author. The second type of review is a non-blinded review. What this means is that the author knows who the reviewers were and the reviewers know who is the author or the author team. What are the pros and cons? Well one of the pros is that you can't hide behind your anonymity. You must make your review very professional because your name is attached to it and your name is revealed. But what are the cons? The con of this review is that you may know that author. You may have a bias for or against that author and that bias may taint how you approach your review. An unblinded review process is you sometimes in the medical literature. So as a reviewer I would encourage you to really know what type of review are you going to be completing. Will this be a blinded review or an unblinded review? So now let's talk about the criteria you will need to use when evaluating a manuscript. All of the forms that you will be sent are done electronically through an editorial system. You will click in and log into the editorial system and then click in to the manuscript and to a reviewer page that you complete after you've read the paper. Some reviews have a checklist area where you will rate various aspects of the manuscript on a Likert type scale. So be sure to fill out that rating list that will help the author and the editor with your opinion on those different rankings. There is often a section where you will make comments to the author. This is a very important section of the review because now you will make very specific comments to the author about the paper. You will cite page and paragraph for example where you want to alert the author that the information they've written is confusing for example. But the most important thing to remember in doing this review is that you are not asked to comment on spelling, grammar, punctuation, reference styling. All of that information is handled by an editorial group. So please don't be distracted and spend a lot of time on a review merely correcting punctuation, grammar and spelling. I can tell you as an editor when I've received reviews back that the only comments are punctuation, spelling, grammar. The review is basically useless. When the reviewer provides no information about the content of the paper, the accuracy of the information, the writing style, the flow, the appropriateness to the audience. If all that information is missing and I merely get spelling and punctuation comments, I have to put that review in the trash. It's of no help. Journals have a whole process where editors work to do the grammar correction, the spelling, the punctuation and they copy edit. So that's not your job as a reviewer. Instead we really want your content expertise. What we want you to know and cite by page and by paragraph where there might be inaccuracies. Is there a part of the paper that doesn't flow well? Does it seem disorganized and you could suggest a better organization? Is there information that's missing that you could suggest be added? You might want to comment is the content too basic for the intended target audience of the journal. You might suggest additional references, key references that the author has missed. So the idea in the review is for you to make specific concrete suggestions to the author. You don't need to rewrite any of the paper, but you might want to suggest maybe a new outline, a new reorganization model. So your suggestions have to be very specific. It's not helpful if you merely say this paper is confusing. Instead be accurate and say what aspect is confusing? On what page did you begin to get confused? It's not helpful if you merely say the content is not covered in enough depth. Instead tell us what's missing. Help the author know. Comments like this is a poor manuscript. That's too vague. It doesn't guide the editor or the author as to what about it's poor. What may just say that? What were your impressions? What needs to be fixed? It's also not helpful if you merely say this paper is filled with inaccuracies. What is it that's inaccurate? Are there math mistakes? Are there tables that percentages are wrong? Are there facts that are wrong? Be specific. That's what we need from you as a reviewer. When you write your review be sure your review is written in a very constructive tone. Authors have worked very hard with their paper. They're very proud of their paper. They're very hopeful the paper will be accepted. So when you write the review make it in a constructive tone, write it in a way that you would want to receive those kind of comments. Things that are not helpful and not appropriate to say to an author are things like this is the worst paper I've ever read in my life or make comments like obviously this is a student paper and this student doesn't know anything they're talking about. These are the kinds of comments I've gotten as an editor and they're really devastating to an author and they're not helpful. Another aspect that I'm often asked by reviewers is how many of the references do I need to check? You don't need to check all the references but would help maybe if you spot checked a few references or if you know of a key reference that should have been mentioned for this content area if it's missing. Feel free to comment if you think the references are too old and outdated and there's more recent work in the literature. So comment about references but you don't really need to go and double check all of the references. If for any reason you believe the manuscript has already been published elsewhere you need to alert the editor right away. Authors cannot do what's called duplicate publication or often called self plagiarism. If an author writes a paper let's suppose a research paper and publishes the data and results of their study they cannot repeat that and publish the data and the results of their study a second time in another journal. So we have to be careful as editors because sometimes authors make that mistake and try to get too many publications out of one work and you'll see duplicate publication where the author actually has the exact same paragraphs, literature review, maybe method section and so that's considered self plagiarism that's not appropriate. If you ever consider plagiarism in that the author has taken works from other authors and not correctly cited it quoted it or given proper notation do also alert the editor. If by any reason you can find the article from which you think the author plagiarized it would be very helpful to the editor if you could provide that.