Information for Reviewers 
Enacted April 1, 2015
Revised September 1, 2017
The World Journal of Men's Health (WJMH) aims to provide a service to authors and the research community by making as much research available as possible, provided it meets WJMH's high standards of research conduct and ethical procedure and is approved after peer review.
Double blind peer review
WJMH uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.
The role of reviewers
If we need your help with appraising a manuscript, we will send you an email and ask you to accept or decline the invitation through our submission system. We ask reviewers to help us to ensure that any studies published in WJMH were conducted properly, are scientifically credible, reported according to the appropriate guidelines (e.g., CONSORT for clinical trials) and ethical.
The editorial team is responsible for the final decision to accept or reject a manuscript, based on the reviewers' comments.
We welcome feedback from our reviewers. If you have any comment you want to make, either on a manuscript you have reviewed and our decision on it or on our review process in general, we would be pleased to hear from you.
To become a WJMH reviewer
If you would like to volunteer, please register at our submissions website (https://www.editorialmanager.com/wjmh). This process will automatically add your name, contact details and expertise to our database of reviewers. Do let us know once you have registered.
Guidance for peer reviewers
All unpublished manuscripts are confidential documents. The existence of a manuscript under review is not revealed to anyone other than peer reviewers and editorial staff. Peer reviewers are required to maintain confidentiality about the manuscripts they review and must not divulge any information about a specific manuscript or its content to any third party without prior permission from the journal editors. If we invite you to review an article and you choose to discuss the manuscript with a colleague, please remind them of the confidential nature of the paper and acknowledge their input in your review. Please also encourage colleagues to register as reviewers.
WJMH uses double-blind peer review, meaning that authors will not know who has reviewed their work.
If you have any serious concerns about a manuscript from a publication ethics perspective—for example, if you believe you have encountered a case of plagiarism—you can contact the editorial office in confidence.
Writing your review
When you provide your review via our submission system, please declare any competing interest that might relate to the article. These should be personal, professional or financial competing interests relevant to the paper being reviewed.
Before writing your review you may find it helpful to browse our instructions for authors, available: https://wjmh.org/index.php?body=instructions.
We ask authors to provide article summaries and to upload appropriate reporting statements' these should aid in the reviewing process. We do not need you to comment on the work's importance to general readers. Please consider it for scientific reliability and ethical conduct.
There are four possible decisions:
1)
Accepted: The manuscript will be forwarded to the publisher without further corrections.
2)
Minor revisions: The author should address the comments from the reviewers, which will be confirmed by the reviewers before being sent to the publisher.
3)
Major revisions: The author should address the comments from the reviewers and make the appropriate corrections for review by the three reviewers.
4)
Rejection: When one out of the three reviewers rejects the manuscript, the final decision is made by the editorial committee.
WJMH peer review process
All submitted manuscripts are reviewed initially by a journal editor. Manuscripts are evaluated according to the following criteria: material is original and timely, writing is clear, study methods are appropriate, data are valid, conclusions are reasonable and supported by the data, information is important, and topic has general medical interest. From these basic criteria, the editors assess a paper's eligibility for publication. Other manuscripts are sent to expert consultants for peer review. Peer reviewer identities are kept confidential and author identities are not made known to reviewers. The existence of a manuscript under review is not revealed to anyone other than peer reviewers and editorial staff. Peer reviewers are required to maintain confidentiality about the manuscripts they review and must not divulge any information about a specific manuscript or its content to any third party without prior permission from the journal editors. Information from submitted manuscripts may be systematically collected and analyzed as part of research to improve the quality of the editorial or peer review process. Identifying information remains confidential. Final decisions regarding manuscript publication are made within the Editorial Team.
Specifically, the peer review goes as:
1.
Editorial assistants pass submitted manuscripts to the Editor-in-Chief.
2.
Depending on the topic of the submitted manuscript, Editor-in-Chief passes the article to Associate Editors or a Member of the Editorial Board with related expertise.
3.
The assigned Associate Editor or Member of the Editorial Board with related expertise invite external reviewers. This is done by literature search to identify the external experts.
4.
External experts review.
5.
External experts make recommendation.
6.
External experts' recommendation plus the assigned Member of the Editorial Board's review
7.
The Editor-in-Chief makes a decision: accept, minor revision, major revision, re-submit, reject.
We are very grateful to everyone who reviewed for the journal and appreciate reviewers’ contribution to the journal that improves the quality of the work we publish.