Paper Review · Biomedicine
A pre-submission review for biomedical papers.
Choose the biomedicine profile at upload and the four reviewers look hardest at sample sizes, statistics, image integrity and the gap between significant and clinically meaningful.
The biomedical profile
What the reviewers look for
These are the instructions the profile adds to the review, in plain words. Each finding in the report quotes the passage it is about and says what would fix it.
- Sample size. Whether a power calculation was actually done, or the sample size came from convention.
- Multiple comparisons. Corrections such as Bonferroni or FDR missing where many tests were run, and p-values clustered just under 0.05.
- Image integrity. Western blot and gel bands that look spliced or repeated, or that do not match the loading control; "representative" images with no quantification.
- Tests and survival curves. Parametric tests on small or non-normal samples, and survival curves without a log-rank test or censoring disclosure.
- Blinding and randomization. Whether the methods show them, or only assert them.
- Registration. For trials, whether the trial is registered and the reported primary endpoint matches the registered one.
- Ethics and conflicts. IRB or IACUC statements that are specific, and conflicts of interest behind industry-funded efficacy claims.
- Clinical relevance. Statistically significant effects that are too small to matter clinically, common in large-N studies.
What a finding looks like
An example from the report
Illustrative, not from a real manuscript: this is the shape each finding takes. The full sample report shows every section.
No power calculation for the animal cohorts.
Quoted: "n = 8 mice per group, consistent with previous studies."
Surfaced by: Statistical Skeptic.
Fix: Report the power calculation that set n, or the smallest effect 8 per group can detect at 80% power, and give confidence intervals alongside the p-values.
In every review
The rest of the report
- Four reviewers: a Methodology Critic, a Statistical Skeptic, a Data Integrity Officer and an Editor-in-Chief, with findings more than one of them raise listed first.
- Every reference checked against CrossRef, and for the most important claims, the cited paper's abstract read to see whether it supports the sentence citing it.
- A figure and table scan for integrity and presentation problems.
- An anonymity scan for double-blind submission.
- A prioritized checklist, as a Markdown report and an annotated PDF with comments on the pages they refer to.
- The Journal Pack ($11) adds a check against one venue's submission rules. In biomedicine it covers Nature Medicine, JAMA, NEJM, The Lancet and The BMJ, plus Nature, Science, Cell and PLOS ONE. All 25 venues.
Questions
Can it read my figures?
How do I choose this profile?
What happens to the manuscript?
How long does it take and what does it cost?
Read it before Reviewer 2 does.
From $9, usually back in 4 to 8 minutes. No account, no subscription.
Other profiles: Machine learningPsychology and social scienceChemistry and materials