Referee guide - Healthcare Technology Letters

Information for reviewers of papers submitted to Healthcare Technology Letters.

Following our recent announcement about the IET’s partnership with Wiley, all of the IET’s journals have migrated to a new online peer-review management system using ScholarOne which is now open for submissions.

If you have been invited to review a paper submitted to ScholarOne, please use the ScholarOne Referee Guide.

Any papers that have been submitted to the journal prior to the system migration will continue to run in ReView and reviewers of these submissions should continue to use the Referee Guide on this page. If you are uncertain of which Referee Guide to use, please contact [email protected].

Contents 

Introduction
Electronic reviewing
Recognition for your peer review contributions
Policy
Confidentiality
Conflict of interest
Originality and novelty
Citations
Conference material policy
Presentation
Scope
Final recommendation
Rapid publication
The report form
Grading the paper
Editage editorial services

Introduction

As with all IET journals, Healthcare Technology Letters requires that papers be subject to peer-review prior to acceptance for publication. This ensures that a high standard of publication is maintained by identifying material that is original, significant, and well presented.

Our journals are international in authorship and readership and our reviewers are selected carefully to reflect this.

We value the work of our reviewers and recognise that you are very busy and dedicated people. We are always interested to hear from you, especially regarding your views on how we can provide the best possible service for you. To help us to do this we encourage you to alert us to the following:

• changes in your contact details;
• periods of unavailability (e.g. holidays, sabbaticals);
• changes in your research interests.

Electronic reviewing

The IET uses a web-based peer review and submission site for submissions to all of its journals. This web-based system accepts submissions and reviews in electronic format only.

Recognition for your peer review contributions

The IET has now partnered with Publons to give you official recognition for your contribution to peer review. Publons helps you to record, verify, and showcase your peer review contributions for use in your CV, biography, and funding and promotion applications. Publons gives recognition for peer review without compromising reviewer anonymity or infringing upon our journal polices. Read more...

Policy

All submissions are given unbiased consideration regardless of race, gender, ethnic origin, or religion of the authors.

All reviews are single-blind i.e. although you as a reviewer know who the authors are, your anonymity is strictly preserved. Please do not correspond with or transmit your review directly to the authors.

Confidentiality

Please treat the paper as confidential. If you are unable to review but wish to recommend a colleague, please let us know and we will invite them to review rather than passing the paper to them yourself. Upon completion of your review, the paper may not be retained, used or cited prior to publication.

Conflict of interest

Please contact us immediately if:

• you are in direct competition with the authors;
• you are a co-worker or collaborator with any of the authors.

Originality and novelty

Papers submitted to Healthcare Technology Letters must record original work not previously published by the authors in the open literature or under consideration by another publisher or conference whose proceedings are made widely available. The work must also be novel, and provide an advance in the field over work published by others.

Please also be aware of the IET Policy in Relation to Plagiarism, Infringement of Copyright and Infringement of Moral Rights and Submission to Multiple Publications.

Citations

The Editors are particularly grateful when reviewers draw their attention to important papers to which proper reference has not been made.  Of course, no reference list can be exhaustive, but authors should reference all papers directly relevant. So please do identify un-cited papers which surpass the presented work, or from which it draws heavily. Essentially, the references should be sufficient to locate the work with respect to the state-of-the-art.

Conference material policy

Healthcare Technology Letters does not accept material that has previously been presented at a conference for which the conference proceedings are widely available. Any manuscripts that are submitted to Healthcare Technology Letters that are based on a conference paper must reference the conference paper and demonstrate a significant advance in the work.

Presentation

Reviewers are asked to consider whether the author presents the material logically, in clear English, and in as concise a manner as possible. Accepted papers will be copyedited to ensure clarity and consistency, to correct minor errors (e.g. typographical or language), to standardise various formatting details and to conform to the Healthcare Technology Letters house style. Therefore, as a reviewer you need not worry about the standard of English unless it obscures the meaning of the paper and could not be easily corrected by a copyeditor, in which case the paper is not suitable for Healthcare Technology Letters.

SI units, and ISO and IEC recommended unit symbols, letter symbols and nomenclature should be used throughout. Reviewers should indicate where other units have been used.

Graphs and other illustrations should be clearly drawn and labelled. Graphs are an effective method of displaying results, although too much information in one graph can cause confusion, and may not be easily reproducible in production. Tabular information should not duplicate graphical information.

Scope

The major themes covered by Healthcare Technology Letters are:

Major technological/methodological areas:

• Biomedical signal processing
• Biomedical imaging and image processing
• Bioinstrumentation (sensors, wearable technologies, etc)
• Biomedical informatics

Major application areas:

• Cardiovascular and respiratory systems engineering
• Neural engineering, neuromuscular systems
• Rehabilitation engineering
• Bio-robotics, surgical planning and biomechanics
• Therapeutic and diagnostic systems, devices and technologies
• Clinical engineering
• Healthcare information systems, telemedicine, mHealth

As a general rule, if a paper has been sent out for review it has been deemed in-scope for Healthcare Technology Letters. However, if a reviewer feels strongly that a particular paper is out of scope they should indicate this and provide an explanation on the report form.

Final recommendation

To maintain the speed of publication and the review process, you are given three options for your final recommendation.  You can recommend to accept papers as they stand, accept subject to minor revisions, or reject outright. Generally, minor revisions are those that would not necessitate re-review.

When making a final recommendation for a manuscript, be aware that the choice of ‘reject’ does not necessarily mean that the Editor’s decision will be a straightforward reject.  Based on your comments and those of the other reviewers, the Editor may reject the paper, but may also encourage the authors to resubmit a substantially revised manuscript.

Rapid publication

Healthcare Technology Letters is a rapid publication journal. Consequently, our procedures and systems are designed to streamline the process of reviewing and preparing a manuscript for publication. The limiting factor in the speed of publication is the review process, and peer-review cannot be rushed if it is to be rigorous. However, given the rapid publication nature of Healthcare Technology Letters we do expect our reviewers to make all reasonable effort to aid us in completing the review process as quickly as possible. We have also designed our report form to allow reviewers to convey their judgement of a manuscript with minimum time and effort.

With this in mind we ask reviewers to complete and return their reviews within 14 days. We understand that this is not always possible if a specific issue arises with a manuscript requiring more effort, but this period is a good general rule for the vast majority of manuscripts. Also, given the decision policy, it is worth bearing in mind that if a paper is so unclear that it cannot be understood without great effort, the clarifications that would be required to make it suitable for publication are likely to lead to its rejection.

We also appreciate that your busy schedules can often create unforeseen delays after you have agreed to perform a review and that this cannot be helped. When this happens, it is very helpful to us if you can inform us if the review is likely to take significantly longer than the 14 day period. If we know that there is going to be a delay, and are given an estimate of how long it is likely to be, we can make informed choices to maintain the speed of review and may even choose to re-assign the manuscript, relieving the pressure on you.

The report form

As discussed above, our reviewer report form has been designed to allow you to convey efficiently your judgement of a manuscript.

At the start of the form we ask you to indicate how close the paper is to your particular fields of expertise. There follows a short list of yes/no questions asking you to state whether you consider the work to be original, novel, well-written and well-organised, to have sufficient references (see citations section above), and whether the applications have been sufficiently explained.

The form then asks for a grading of the paper from a range of choices (described below) followed by your final recommendation for the paper. If you would be happy to review a resubmission of the manuscript then you can check yes in the next section.

The final section of the report form is for any comments you would like to make to the Editor and comments to the author.  As it is the policy for Healthcare Technology Letters to provide feedback to the authors, the Editor appreciates any comments provided.  It is also helpful if the comments are as constructive as possible.  Bear in mind, your review should be objective so please do not make comments about the paper or authors that could cause offence.

Grading the paper

The selection of gradings offered on the report form is listed below:

• Outstanding work of great significance;
• Good and useful advance in the field;
• Of sufficient interest for rapid publication;
• Not a significant advance:
  This applies to work which is technically sound, but its contribution to the field is so small as to be negligible;
• Technically unsound:
  This grade should be chosen if the paper contains such irreparable technical errors, or if the premise of the work is so flawed, that the results become dubious;
• Otherwise unsuitable:
  The special reviewing criteria of Healthcare Technology Letters mean that some technically sound papers are still not suitable for the journal. This grade is intended for papers that do not quite fit into any of the above gradings, but which the reviewer considers to be unsuitable for Healthcare Technology Letters. When selecting this grading it is important to provide direct supporting comments to explain why the paper is considered to be unsuitable.

There are also two special cases for which the Otherwise unsuitable category should be used:

1. Where there is evidence that a paper has been split into multiple papers or variations on a theme: as the pressure to publish is intensifying, some authors are resorting to splitting work which could easily be detailed in one paper into two or more papers or submitting multiple papers on essentially the same topic with only minor differences; and
2. Where there is insufficient detail and or a lack of comparison with existing techniques.

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