INFORMATION AND GUIDANCE FOR REVIEWERS

About The Journal of Physiology

Manuscript processing system

Editorial procedures

Review process
Confidentiality

Editorial roles

Senior Editors
Reviewing Editors
Expert Referees

Conflict of interest

Reports

Scientific quality
Language and presentation
Experimental ethics
Scientific misconduct and publication ethics
Wording of reports

Criteria for recommending rejection or acceptance

Acceptance

Rejection

ABOUT THE JOURNAL OF PHYSIOLOGY

The Journal Physiology is owned by The Physiological Society which is contractually responsible to its publishers for editorial policy, maintenance of intellectual standards and the appointment of an Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief forms the Editorial Board. Specific members of the Board are appointed to an Executive Committee which oversees the operation of The Journal.

Scope and subject areas
Journal statistics
Editorial Board
journals{at}physoc.org

Manuscript processing system
All manuscripts for The Journal of Physiology, from submission to acceptance, are processed online via the Bench Press online manuscript processing system (http://submit.jphysiol.org) administered from The Physiological Society's Publications Office. Editors, reviewers and authors communicate through the Publications Office (journals{at}physoc.org).

Editorial procedures
Submitted manuscripts are assigned to a Senior Editor who appoints a member of the Editorial Board to act as Reviewing Editor. Senior Editors may themselves review manuscripts, acting as both Senior Editor and Reviewing Editor for these manuscripts.

Review process
If a paper is clearly outside the journal's remit or does not warrant a full review because it is considered insufficiently novel and important and likely to have little or no impact on the subject area, triage may be recommended by the Senior Editor and/or the Reviewing Editor. If triage is recommended, the manuscript is returned to the authors as quickly as possible with a covering letter giving reasons for triage, but without a full report.

Papers recommended for full review are independently reviewed by two Expert Referees, who are acknowledged experts in the field and are invited by the Reviewing Editor to report on the manuscript. In some cases a third Expert Referee may be consulted. It is the aim of the Editorial Board that authors should receive an editorial report within four weeks of receipt of the complete manuscript in the Publications Office. If an Expert Referee fails to report on time, the Reviewing Editor may make an editorial decision without further delay. Referees who prove to be unreliable will not be invited to review for the journal.

Confidentiality
Whilst a manuscript is under review, it should be treated as strictly confidential. It should not be given for comment to any other party without prior permission from The Journal, and it should not be passed on to Journal Club meetings.

Please do not contact the authors directly. Communication should be through the Senior Editor and the journals{at}physoc.org.

EDITORIAL ROLES

Senior Editors
The Editorial Board of TheJournal of Physiology appoints Senior Editors who are responsible for the quality of publications in a specific field of interest. They will be assigned a list of Reviewing Editors with expertise relevant to that field. The Senior Editors distribute papers to appropriate Reviewing Editors, decide on the basis of reports received whether or not a paper is acceptable for publication, and communicate the decision to the author. Senior Editors also check experimental and publication ethics on all submitted manuscripts (in consultation with an Ethics Editor where appropriate), scrutinise revised papers (in consultation with the Reviewing Editor if necessary), liaise with the Editor-in-Chief on complaints or appeals from authors, and actively promote their areas of research.

Reviewing Editors
The major task of Reviewing Editors is to ensure, by prompt and skilful reviewing, that The Journal attracts and publishes papers of high scientific quality that are of considerable importance in the field. With the help and advice of Expert Referees, Reviewing Editors provide a report and recommendation for acceptance or rejection for all the manuscripts they receive. The Senior Editor is responsible for the final decision on acceptance or rejection. Reviewing Editors normally return an initial decision to authors within 4 weeks of submission.

Expert Referees
The role of the Expert Referee is to give an opinion on the scientific merit of the paper, but the Expert Referee's review form also invites comments on other aspects of the paper. Referees are invited to provide comments for the author, which should include specific opinions on the paper and suggestions for its improvements, and comments for the Senior Editor, including any opinions on suitability for publication or which may be unsuitable for direct communication to the author. The Editor may additionally ask for specific advice on any aspect (such as terminology, methods, statistics) with which s/he is not entirely familiar. Expert Referees are asked to submit a report within 14 days. They should decline the invitation to review or inform the Publications Office if they cannot meet this deadline or have a conflict of interest.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Expert Referees who are known to have conflicts of interest with the authors of a particular manuscript will not be invited to review the manuscript. The specific conflicts of interest are listed at http://journals.physoc.org/site/misc/policy.xhtml#ethstan

Expert Referees invited to review a manuscript should declare any of these conflicts of interest if they accept the invitation.
It is not a conflict of interest to have reviewed the manuscript for a different journal, but the Referee should declare this when accepting the invitation to review.
For further information on conflict of interest, see:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/reviewerGuidelines.action#competing
http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/competing.action

REPORTS

Scientific quality
Expert Referees are asked to consider the following points in their report:

  • impact on the area of research
  • insight into physiological mechanisms in this field
  • originality of the research
  • study design and robustness of the experimental data
  • validity of the conclusions

Language and presentation
Editors and Referees should be aware that papers in The Journal of Physiology are read not only by specialists but also by those entering a new field of research, and by students. If the scientific message of the paper is obscured by poor English or inappropriate presentation, this should be noted in the report. Avoidable jargon and esoteric abbreviations should be discouraged and where inappropriate nomenclature has been used, the more usual form should be indicated. If extensive corrections to the English are required to make the paper intelligible, this should be reported to the Publications Office either before or after editorial review. The Publications Office will advise the authors to seek help with the English before returning the manuscript. Manuscripts can be sent to the journal's appointed English/Scientific Language Editor at the expense of the authors (www.english-science-editing.com) if they are agreeable.

Experimental ethics
Reviewers should familiarise themselves with journal policy on Ethical standards in research.
To ensure that papers published are of a high standard both scientifically and with respect to the ethics of experimentation, The Journal of Physiology appoints Ethics Editors who provide prompt advice on ethical questions raised by Editors or Expert Referees. If the Editor or Expert Referee has doubts about the ethical acceptability of experiments conducted on animals or humans, the Publications Office will ensure that the authors are asked to address the problem before undertaking any scientific revision. The authors will be advised to proceed only when the Ethics Editors are satisfied that the issue has been resolved; usually this involves amplification of the Methods section so that the humanity of the experiments is no longer in doubt.

Scientific misconduct and publication ethics
With the apparent increase in scientific misconduct, Editors should be alert to possible irregularities in any paper received for review and check that the paper does not overlap material already published. Any suspicions of research or publication misconduct should be referred immediately, in strict confidence, to the Senior Editor who will pass it to the Society's Publication Ethics Committee.

For further information on journal ethical policies, see:
Ethical standards in research
Editorial Ethics
Publications Ethics

Wording of reports
Material included under 'Comments for Authors' in the report forms should be anonymous, courteous and suitable for transmission to the author without modification. Separate confidential comments made to the Senior Editor may be paraphrased in the decision letter to the authors at the discretion of the Senior Editor.

Where the Editor or Referee wishes to recommend rejection, grounds for this opinion must be very clearly stated. It is particularly important that authors are not antagonised, or given grounds for appeal, by the use of insensitive language.

Editors and Referees should give clear reasons for recommending acceptance. Ideally the reports should start with a statement of the key scientific aspects of the work that provide a significant enhancement of physiological understanding and are likely to have a high impact. Few papers will receive unqualified acceptance; most authors will be expected to make changes, sometimes involving new experiments. The changes required should be clearly spelt out in the report but the implication that these will automatically lead to acceptance should be avoided.

CRITERIA FOR RECOMMENDING REJECTION OR ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance
To be acceptable, papers must be technically sound, clearly written, and provide significant new data or a new physiological insight based at least in part on new data. The paper can be accepted as submitted, or with only minor corrections or suggested improvements. This may be the case if a manuscript which is resubmitted as a new paper following major revision.
More usually papers are potentially acceptable subject to satisfactory revision. In this case the covering letter accompanying the reports emphasises what has to be done, and time limits for submitting a revised version. Referees who raised concerns on the initial version of a manuscript will be asked to review the revised version to ensure that their concerns have been properly addressed.

Rejection (including triage)
The Editorial Board seeks to maintain The Journal of Physiology's high ranking position by rejecting papers that are not of the highest quality. Papers that are considered by the Senior Editor to be clearly unsuitable for publication in The Journal may be sent to an Editor (or another Senior Editor) for a second opinion. Reasons for such unsuitability include:

  • insufficient physiological relevance
  • insufficient novelty - no new important principles or contribution to existing principles
  • too phenomenological without identifying basic physiological mechanisms
  • too highly specialised and more appropriate in relevant subject/systems journals
  • unlikely to have a high impact in the field
  • studies do not meet journal's ethical standards (Ethical standards in research; Publication ethics)

Triage - rejection without a full report - may be recommended if a paper is clearly not within the journal's remit or does not warrant a full review. If, in the opinion of the Senior Editor and/or the Editor, the manuscript is considered insufficiently novel and important and likely to have little or no impact on the subject area, then triage should be recommended as quickly as possible to save time and effort on both sides. If triage is agreed, the manuscript is returned to the authors with a covering letter giving reasons for triage, but without a full report.

ABSOLUTE GROUNDS FOR REJECTION

  • The work is unethical or does not have proper ethical permission
  • the work described is not original. This includes work that is basically an expansion of the authors' results published elsewhere (Editors must disregard any work by other authors, of which they happen to be aware, if it has not yet been published)
  • the work is unsound, for example:
    • there are flaws in the design of experiments or in the analysis of data
    • the conclusions are inadequately supported by the results
    • there is evidence in the literature that invalidates key elements of the work
  • the paper does not significantly further physiological understanding, for example:
    • the observations are too specialised and of little interest to physiologists
    • the experiments are essentially derivative and the results unsurprising
    • the key results are uninterpretable without further experiments
    • the phenomena described are of no clear physiological relevance
  • the paper is badly arranged or poorly written, for example:
    • it may be much too long for its substance
    • the data cannot be assessed because the figures are so badly presented
    • confused or confusing presentation renders it incomprehensible

Possible grounds for rejection
Papers of the following kinds are usually unsuitable but may be accepted if they are of exceptional merit:

  • purely theoretical papers, unless based on experimentally derived data and the hypothesis advanced is directly amenable to experimental testing
  • descriptions of new techniques unaccompanied by new physiological observations
  • papers in fields related to physiology but which are not primarily of physiological interest
  • papers on functions of invertebrates, or lower vertebrates, that have no counterparts among higher vertebrates and are unlikely to elucidate functions of the latter

Resubmission
If the Editor considers that the paper could become acceptable if major revisions were undertaken, this may be indicated in the letter of rejection.  Authors may be invited to make a new submission, based on the rejected manuscript, referring to the original manuscript number in their cover letter, and attaching a full response to the original reports.

Further opinions on recommending rejection
Where a Senior Editor considers that a recommendation for rejection is not adequately supported by the reports, or where there are other grounds for doubt, s/he may go back to the Reviewing Editor or Referee to ask for clarification or a more substantial report. Alternatively, the Senior Editor may seek further opinions from a second Reviewing Editor. When conflicting recommendations are received, the Senior Editor will decide the outcome, taking further advice as necessary.

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