Reviewer instructions

When you accept to review a submission for MELBA, you acknowledge that you have no conflict of interest¹ for this submission and you are able to provide an unbiased, rigorous scientific review.

There are two types of submissions: original research contributions and review articles.

For original research contributions, please consider the following points when reviewing:

• Significance: Are the objectives of the study scientifically important and aligned with MELBA’s scope?
• Novelty and/or Impact: Does the paper make contributions that are sufficiently new, interesting, and/or impactful? This can include novel methodology and/or adaptation of existing methods for novel biomedical applications.
• Methodology: Is the methodology well-formulated and appropriate for the application?
• Validity: The claims are backed up by cited work, well-crafted experiments, and/or theory.
• Related Work: Do the authors clearly and sufficiently acknowledge relevant prior literature and place their contribution in relation to it?
• Ethical Issues: Has the paper followed appropriate ethical guidelines? Are there issues related to scientific integrity, conflicts of interest, and biomedical research as relevant (such as ethical treatment of human and animal subjects)?
• Presentation: Are the goals and contributions of the work clearly and correctly stated? Are the problem description, approach and evaluation adequately detailed for others to replicate the work? Is the language clear, readable, with good grammar and few (if any) typographical errors?
• Reproducibility: Are the results and conclusions of the paper reproducible? Is the code and/or data shared?

For review articles, submissions should be a critical, systematic, thorough, and novel survey of the literature focused on a topic of relevance. The presentation should be clear and readable. Conflicts of interest should be acknowledged.

Recommendation: Please recommend a decision: accept (conditional on minor changes and will not go out for external review), revise and resubmit, or reject. If you suggest “conditional accept”, please provide a precise list of changes that can easily be checked upon resubmission.

^{1: Some obvious conflicts of interest include, but are not limited to: You have co-authored or collaborated with one of the authors in the last 3 years; You have served as an advisor or been the advisee of one of the authors in the last 10 years; You have received funding from a grant that also supports one of the authors, accepting or rejecting the paper would benefit you, etc. Any practice that can be interpreted as compromising the objective nature of the review process can also be considered as violating this policy. In case of questions related to conflicts, feel free to consult with the editor. ↑}