Year: 2016
Type: editorial
Abstract: Medical Physics prides itself on being the premier international journal on the application of physical and mathematical methodologies to problems in medicine and biology. A major component of this success is our rigorous and comprehensive peer-review process to which all submitted manuscripts are subjected. Its purpose is to improve the quality of all manuscripts: our review teams take pride in working closely with authors to transform promising manuscripts into publishable articles and acceptable manuscripts into outstanding articles. Working through this review process has helped many junior researchers learn the fundamentals of scientific writing and is a useful educational experience in critical analysis for referees as well. To further improve the Medical Physics peer review process, Working Group #1 of the Editorial Board (improving review process efficiency, quality, and selectivity) has developed a new referee template. We believe this template will be helpful for beginning as well as experienced reviewers. It includes mandatory and optional elements to aid the referee in writing a comprehensive review, thereby better enabling the Associate Editor and Editor to more accurately and fairly assess the potential impact and scientific quality of the paper. Referees are not required to complete optional elements of this template, but it is highly recommended that they use this template as a guide to ensure that all review elements are addressed, including novelty, readability, methodological soundness, and validity of conclusions. The template prompts the referee to address each major section of the manuscript. Authors will also find the template useful as a concise summary of our review criteria. The template is shown below. After selecting an overall rating and selecting overall assessment scores, the referees can either fill in their comments in each individual textbox or in the free-form review box or both. Use of the free-form box alone is akin to our previous review process. 1. Rate the importance of this manuscript to other researchers/clinical practice in terms of impact and new knowledge on a scale from 1 to 9 (1–3: high importance, 4–6: medium importance, 7–9: low importance) 2. Good science (1 = outstanding to 9 = marginal) 3. New science (1 = outstanding to 9 = marginal) PLEASE GIVE US YOUR SECTION-SPECIFIC FEEDBACK. THIS PART IS OPTIONAL, BUT YOUR FEEDBACK WOULD HELP OUR ASSESSMENT. (You need not answer all questions, unless relevant. The editor encourages referees to comment on any aspect of the manuscript that they think will help the editor and associate editor make a decision. This includes strengths as well as weaknesses.) Medical Physics seeks papers that describe developments of novel, state-of-the-art methods for improved medical imaging and therapy, and new developments or analyses that make a significant contribution to scientific and/or clinical knowledge related to medical physics. The following is excerpted from our present instructions to authors and our most recent editorial vision statement:4 “In addition to novelty, Medical Physics articles should contain generalizable scientific data or conclusions and should be of interest to a defined subset of our readership. Articles that address a narrow clinical physics problem, e.g., evaluation of a specific quality-assurance commercial product, are likely not suitable for Medical Physics, while articles that propose a novel quality assurance strategy that could be implemented on many commercial platforms would be of interest. Articles in the former category might be of interest to Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics (JACMP) readers. Similarly, image processing innovations, e.g., automated segmentation/labeling tools, without demonstrated impact in medical imaging are better suited for image-processing journals.” Submitted papers must be written in clear and concise scientific English free of major style and grammatical errors. Poorly written papers make it difficult for referees to understand the authors’ work and to review the paper. Both authors and referees should be aware that our publisher's copy editors do not have the resources nor time to extensively edit papers for correct English before publication. Nor is it the referee's responsibility to make long lists of grammatical and stylistic errors. Authors who are not fluent in English should engage the services of an expert English-language scientific editor to produce a well written manuscript prior to submission. The title of the manuscript should be attention-getting and informative. It should be brief and avoid acronyms unless commonly used (e.g., CT and MRI). The abstract is an extremely important part of the paper as it is the reader's first introduction to the paper. The abstract should summarize the entire study (purpose, methods, results, conclusions). The results should be quantitative. For readability, the use of acronyms should be minimized. The abstract should stand alone, i.e., be understandable without having to read the paper for clarifications. The length of the abstract should be 500 words or less for research articles and technical reports and 300 words or less for technical notes and Medical Physics letters. The introduction section should summarize prior work, identify the problem being addressed and its clinical importance, identify the gap in knowledge being filled by the manuscript, and articulate the hypotheses, if any, addressed by the paper. The novelty and clinical and/or scientific importance of the authors’ contribution should be emphasized. The methods section should be clear and concise. The authors should provide enough detail for others to repeat the study. Even if the methods are described in a previous publication, they should be summarized so the authors’ paper has sufficient detail to stand-alone. The final section of the methods section should describe the statistical methods that were used to analyze the data. Where appropriate, referees should determine whether the power of the study is sufficient and whether the correct statistical measures were used. The results section should follow the same order as the methods section. It should mostly include the results, leaving the majority of the discussion to the discussion section. The discussion section should summarize the main results, discussing how they support or disagree with any hypotheses and how the results impact the field. Some suggested sections recommended by Docherty and Smith1 include the following: strengths and weaknesses of the authors’ study; strengths and weakness in relation to other previous studies; meaning of the authors’ study; unanswered questions and future research to pursue. Two common pitfalls are overstating the significance of the authors’ findings and discussion of “extraneous ideas, concepts or information” not covered by the topic.2 The conclusion is not just a restatement of the results, but some final summative statements about the outcomes of the authors’ study.2 It should discuss the extent to which the authors have succeeded in addressing the need identified in the Introduction section.3 It should focus on the authors’ findings and the meaning of those findings.3 It should contain a succinct take-home message. All tables and figures should include captions that are intelligible without referring to the text in the main body of the manuscript. The structure of the tables should be clear with simple column headings including the units of measure when appropriate. Helvetica and Arial fonts are preferred for figures. Graphs should utilize sufficiently thick lines and large enough fonts and symbols to ensure that graphs are legible when the figures are reduced in size for publication. Ideally graph tick marks should be placed on all four sides of the graph frame and the number of tick marks should commensurate with the accuracy of the plotted data. Figures in the electronic version of the paper will be in color, but they will only be in color in the printed journal if the authors pay an extra fee. If the figures are to be color only in the electronic version, authors must ensure that all illustrations are legible when reproduced in grayscale. Authors should confirm the colors, line styles, and legends are distinct by printing their figures on a black and white printer, or by printing in grayscale, or by viewing a saved black and white PDF version of their paper. (To create such a file, open a color PDF version of the manuscript with Adobe Acrobat Pro, select print, choose Adobe PDF as the printer, and check “Print in grayscale (black and white),” and then print.) Some common paper deficiencies include the following: (taken from former Medical Physics editor William Hendee's presentation at the 2013 AAPM meeting) incorrect grammar, illogical composition, obscure writing, verbose writing, deviation from Medical Physics style and required organizational structure, poor illustrations, mathematical and/or physics errors, conclusions that over-reach the results, inadequate, excessive, or poorly focused literature reviews, incremental advances, no clear delineation between methods and results (e.g., results in methods section and/or methods in results section), inadequate methods section-not enough details for others to repeat the study, plagiarism or self-plagiarism (submission of a manuscript that is a more substantial version of a previously published conference (e.g., SPIE) proceedings paper is acceptable as long as the submitted work is a more substantial study (more details about the methods, more cases investigated, more sophisticated analyses, etc.). We hope reviewers and authors find the above information helpful in improving both the reviewing and writing of papers submitted to Medical Physics.
Source: Medical Physics
DOI: 10.1118/1.4954788
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2460033266