Intermountain Journal of Translational Medicine relies on volunteer reviewers from the scientific community to assess the validity of articles submitted for consideration for publication. All reviews are double-blinded. 

Invitation to Review 

Reviewers are selected based on expertise in the field relevant to the manuscript under consideration. You may be contacted by IMJTM editors or invited directly through the OJS editorial system. Reviewing requires a journal account. Review assignments may be accessed through your journal login under the “My Queue” tab.

Best Practices 

Reviewers who agree to review a manuscript should keep the following in mind:

1. Declare any conflicts of interest including, but not limited to, recent or current collaboration with any manuscript authors. 
2. Keep manuscripts confidential and do not share information about submissions outside of the editorial workflow. 
3. Provide prompt reviews (the usual deadline to accept a review is 2 weeks, and the usual deadline to submit is 2-4 weeks) or inform editorial staff of any delays. 

What to Assess When Reviewing 

Manuscripts must meet our criteria for publication and comply with our editorial policies. Below is a summary of the criteria for publication. More detail may be found here. 

Criteria for Publication

1. The results of the manuscript under consideration have not been published elsewhere, unless allowed by a specific exemption as detailed in our editorial policies (e.g., preprints, thesis, conference abstracts, etc.).
2. Any experiments, systematic reviews of the literature, statistics, or other analysis has been conducted to a high standard with methodology described in sufficient detail to both allow assessment during review and replication if published. 
3. Conclusions are supported by methodology and results. 
4. The article is written in English, and the quality of the writing is sufficient so as not to impede understanding of the contents. 
5. All relevant standards of ethics and research integrity are met. 
6. Any relevant reporting guidelines are followed (e.g. PRISMA for systematic reviews). 
7. All information and citations presented, for example in the background of an original research paper or in the review section of a review, should be factually correct, relevant, and recent.

How to Write a Review

The purpose of a review is to provide our editors with an expert opinion on the validity of the manuscript under consideration as well as to provide the authors with actionable feedback on their papers. Ideally review feedback should be presented with the goal of improving the manuscript such that it meets the criteria for publication in IMJTM. To that end, consider the following questions as you write your review:

• What are the main claims of the paper? How do they relate to prior research? Are they relevant/novel?
• Are the claims placed in context of existing literature?
• Are the methods appropriate given the research question?
• Are the methods described in detail such that the experiments in the manuscript could be replicated?
• Do the results follow logically from the presented methods?
• Do the results and analysis, as presented in the manuscript, support the claims? If not, what additional experiments/analysis might the authors provide to adequately support the claims?
• If human or animal subjects are involved, are relevant guidelines followed?
• If a review was conducted, are relevant reporting guidelines followed?
• Is the manuscript organized and written well enough to allow easy understanding?

After Submitting Your Review

Once your review has been received, an editor will assess your recommendations and forward your comments to the authors, who may have an opportunity to revise their manuscript. If revisions are required, you may be asked to re-review the paper once those revisions have been submitted. After all rounds of review are complete, an editor will render a final decision regarding the manuscript based on reviewer comments, IMJTM publication criteria, and their own assessment of the manuscript.