Reviewing articles for Student BMJ

To review articles you must be a medical student or junior doctor. You'll need to register on BenchPress - our online editorial office at http://submit.bmj.com and then we can send you articles that have been submitted to the Student BMJ for peer-review. Include the term Student BMJ under "expertise" in personal information area. This is very important as our search is very sensitive and we will only be able to use you as a reviewer with this exact term. When reviewing an article, you should follow our reviewer guidelines. See below.

We would also like you to join the BMJ's social networking sight 'Doc2Doc' and joint our Student BMJ group. Please go to http://www.doc2doc.bmj.com and register.

We also encourage you to follow us on Twitter. Go to www.twitter.com and follow @studentbmj

Reviewer guidelines

The manuscript is a confidential document. Please do not discuss this even with the author.

Student BMJ has a system of open peer review. This means that you will be asked to sign your report on any article we send you. It does not mean that authors should contact you directly; we will continue to ask them to direct any queries through us. Openness also means that we ask reviewers and authors to declare any competing interest that might relate to articles considered by Student BMJ.

As a reviewer you will be advising the editors, who make the final decision. We will let you know our decision. We will pass on your signed report to the author; please do not make any comments that you do not wish the author to see. Even if we do not accept an article we would like to pass on constructive comments that might help the author to improve it.

Please give detailed comments (with references, whenever possible) that will both help the editors to make a decision on the article and the authors to improve it. Do be courteous and constructive in these comments and "do as you would be done unto".

We suggest some points to consider below, but they are by no means an exhaustive checklist. Please use your discretion.

For all articles:

1) Is this an important topic for medical students and junior doctors?
2) Is it relevant to an international audience?
3) Has a similar article been published in Student BMJ before? How does it compare?(search our website and our archive)
4) Is it the article useful?
5) Does the article offer more than a standard textbook chapter on the topic? (particularly think about this when reviewing education articles)
6) Does the article read well and make sense?
7) Are there any glaring omissions?
8) Is any part of the article not clear?
9) Are references up to date and relevant?
10) Do you think it should be published in the Student BMJ?

What we don't need

Comments on spelling and grammatical issues - our editing process will correct these.