Review Process

eLife peer reviews research in all areas of the life sciences and medicine. We are committed to improving peer review so that it better conveys the assessments of expert editors and reviewers to authors, readers and other interested parties. The key features of eLife’s editorial process – which combines the immediacy and openness of preprints with the scrutiny of peer review by experts – are:

  • eLife only peer reviews submissions that are available as preprints
  • We do not have the capacity to review every preprint submitted to us, so editors identify submissions where the reviews will be of greatest public value
  • eLife no longer accepts or rejects papers after peer review: all submissions that are peer reviewed are published as Reviewed Preprints on the eLife website after the peer-review process has been completed.
  • During the review process, editors and reviewers discuss their reviews with each other and produce a written assessment of the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence reported, using a common vocabulary to ensure consistency.
  • The peer-review process has two other outputs: i) Public Reviews that comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the preprint, and indicate whether the claims and conclusions are justified by the data; ii) Recommendations for the authors, including requests for revisions and suggestions for improvement.
  • The eLife assessment and Public Reviews are posted alongside the preprint on the eLife website two weeks after they have been sent to the authors; authors can provide a response if they wish or ask for factual errors to be corrected. The recommendations for the authors are not made public at this stage.
  • Authors can submit a revised preprint at any time; eLife editors will decide if the revised preprint warrants a new eLife assessment and/or new Public Reviews. The updated Reviewed Preprint will also include the recommendations for the authors, and the authors’ response to these.
  • Authors can also request that eLife produces a Version of Record (VOR) for their preprint.

Reviewers retain copyright of their review and consent to eLife publishing it using a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

Further information can be found in our review process FAQ.

Reviewer Consultation Session

After all reviews are submitted, they are shared with the reviewers and the Reviewing Editor, within an online consultation session, in which the reviewers can see the names and reviews of the other participants. As publishing decisions are no longer a goal of our peer-review process, we are able to focus on the production of constructive Public Reviews that evaluate the paper before us. The post-review consultation session allows reviewers to contribute to the eLife assessment, a concise summary of the significance of the findings and the evidence for them.

Implicit Bias

Implicit bias (unconscious associations that affect our actions) has repeatedly been shown to influence decisions in scholarly publishing, especially with respect to author gender, career stage, nationality and other social groupings. To help increase awareness of what implicit bias is and how it might affect the eLife review process we encourage editors and reviewers to consult resources such as Project Implicit and Outsmarting Human Minds.

Involvement of early-career researchers in peer review

eLife encourages the involvement of early-career researchers in the review process. eLife's pool of early-career reviewers aims to provide outstanding early-stage researchers the opportunity to peer review manuscripts.

To be considered for inclusion within eLife’s pool of early-career reviewers, please apply online. To be eligible, researchers should either be either a postdoctoral researcher or have spent less than five years in an independent research position, and they should have had at least two first-author publications in an area of research within the scope of eLife. Members of the pool are approved by eLife editors. Please note that applicants to the pool should first have a profile in eLife’s submission site (create or update a profile here) and we encourage applicants to keep their contact details/affiliation, relevant keywords and subject areas up to date. We typically advise further within four weeks.

eLife also encourages reviewers to involve early-career colleagues as co-reviewers, and we enable all reviewers to receive credit for their contributions through services such as ORCID or the Web of Science researcher profile (formerly Publons).

Revised submissions

Authors can revise their Reviewed Preprint after review and ask for the revised version to be assessed and then published. The revised Reviewed Preprint will include an eLife assessment (updated where appropriate), Public Reviews (updated where appropriate so they are specific to the latest version of the paper), and the authors list of changes or responses to the previous reviews (including recommendations to the authors).

Reviewers will often be asked to update their original Public Review, although we discourage multiple rounds of review. We will often also engage with the original reviewers to ask whether the previous eLife assessment should be updated. In some cases, for example if one of the original reviewers isn’t available, we may need to make editorial updates to the original reviews, or consult with others to ask if any changes are appropriate.

We recommend that a review of a revised version includes all the elements of a Public Review:

  • A summary of what the authors were trying to achieve.
  • An account of the major strengths and weaknesses of the methods and results.
  • An appraisal of whether the authors achieved their aims, and whether the results support their conclusions.
  • A discussion of the likely impact of the work on the field, and the utility of the methods and data to the community.
  • Any additional context you think would help readers interpret or understand the significance of the work.

Writing your Review

For submissions from January 31, 2023, eLife will no longer make accept/reject decisions after peer review. Instead, every preprint sent for peer review will be published on the eLife website as a “Reviewed Preprint” that includes detailed Public Reviews, an eLife assessment, and a response from the authors (if they have submitted one)

Please note that authors have the opportunity to include an “Ideas and Speculation” subsection within their Discussion. This is a section for authors to share their ideas about their work, although reviewers can comment on any factual inaccuracies, clarity and speculation not germane to the paper (read more).

The review form includes the following sections:

Assessment (between two and four sentences)

This is a very short summary of the reviewer’s assessment of the work and its likely impact in the field, outside the field, or in society. This assessment should be easily readable by non-experts, and should clearly convey the judgment of the reviewer about whether the papers’ primary claims are supported by the data, and to whom the manuscript will be of interest or use. The assessment should not repeat the abstract of the paper, it should be easily readable by non-experts, and it should not use field-specific jargon or abbreviations.

In one or two sentences, please summarise the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence presented in support of them, using using the most appropriate terms and some of the phrases below (edited as needed):

Describing the significance of the findings:

  • Landmark: findings with profound implications that are expected to have widespread influence
  • Fundamental: findings that substantially advance our understanding of major research questions
  • Important: findings that have theoretical or practical implications beyond a single subfield
  • Valuable: findings that have theoretical or practical implications for a subfield
  • Useful: findings that have focused importance and scope

Describing the strength of evidence:

  • Exceptional: exemplary use of existing approaches that establish new standards for a field
  • Compelling: evidence that features methods, data and analyses more rigorous than the current state of the art
  • Convincing: appropriate and validated methodology in line with current state-of-the-art
  • Solid: methods, data and analyses broadly support the claims with only minor weaknesses
  • Incomplete: main claims are only partially supported
  • Inadequate: methods, data and analyses do not support the primary claims

As part of the reviewer consultation session, the Reviewing Editor will compose a single eLife assessment that the authors could include on a CV or a job or grant application as an independent, external assessment of the impact of their work (read more).

A series of example eLife assessments follow:

  • This fundamental work substantially advances our understanding of protein import into peroxisomes by identifying a novel player in this process and uncovering its mode of action. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling, with rigorous biochemical assays and state-of-the-art microscopy. The work will be of broad interest to cell biologists and biochemists.
  • This study presents a valuable finding on the increased activity of two well-studied signal transduction pathways in a specific subtype of breast cancer. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, although inclusion of a larger number of patient samples and an animal model would have strengthened the study. The work will be of interest to medical biologists working on breast cancer.
  • This important study combines experiments and theory to quantify the force exerted on chromosomes during cell division. The new method for force measurements is highly compelling and goes beyond the current state of the art, but the theoretical analysis is incomplete and would benefit from more rigorous approaches. With the theoretical part strengthened, this paper would be of interest to cell biologists and biophysicists working on the cytoskeleton and cell division.
  • This study presents a useful inventory of genes that are up- and down regulated in human heart tissue during aging. The data were collected and analyzed using solid and validated methodology and can be used as a starting point for functional studies of heart development and disease.
  • This paper reports the fundamental discovery of a new mode of mammalian cell migration, which does not involve either actin or microtubule cytoskeleton. If confirmed, the study will change the way we think about cell motility and would be of very broad general interest. However, whereas some of the imaging data are compelling, the functional analyses are inadequate as they rely on a very limited set of pharmacological treatments.
  • This landmark study provides a comprehensive morphological and molecular description of the majority of documented neuronal cell types in the mouse cortex. This provides an extraordinary resource that will be invaluable to the whole neuroscience community. The methodology for combining expansion microscopy with spatially resolved transcriptomics across tissues is exceptional and establishes a new standard in the field.

Public Review

The Public Review is the main section of the review. It contains the detailed assessment of the reviewer of the work, written primarily for others reading the paper or considering using its methods, data or conclusions.

Our goal is to change how we construct and write peer reviews to make them useful to both authors and readers in a way that better reflects the work reviewers put into reading and thinking about a paper.

We expect the bulk of a reviewer’s thoughts and judgment about a paper will be in the Public Review, with only specific types of comments reserved for recommendations for the authors.

We recommend that Public Reviews contain:

  • A summary of what the authors were trying to achieve.
  • An account of the major strengths and weaknesses of the methods and results.
  • An appraisal of whether the authors achieved their aims, and whether the results support their conclusions.
  • A discussion of the likely impact of the work on the field, and the utility of the methods and data to the community.
  • Any additional context you think would help readers interpret or understand the significance of the work.

The public nature of these reviews means that they:

  • Should be clear about any technical and conceptual concerns, but should also be written in a serious and constructive manner appropriate for a public audience, and mindful of the impact language choices might have on the authors.
  • Address the entire paper, not just individual points or sections.
  • Highlight how and where the authors succeeded, where there are useful data, and where there are major conceptual and technical advances.

The public review is an assessment of the manuscript in its current form, and is independent of any particular publishing decision. They should therefore not include:

  • Comments on the appropriateness of the manuscript for publication or speculation about where it should be published.
  • Suggestions on how to improve the science or the manuscript, especially those directed at increasing its impact, except where they help to convey points raised in the review to readers.
  • Open-ended questions.
  • Discussion of minor points or issues of presentation except where they may lead to confusion about the major points of the paper.

Examples of public reviews can be found below. Please note that we may lightly edit the reviews for tone and consistency prior to posting.

Recommendations for the authors

Although most aspects of a reviewer’s assessment belong in the public review, we reserve some types of comments and queries for a private set of recommendations for authors.

This section should include:

  • Suggestions for improved or additional experiments, data or analyses.
  • Recommendations for improving the writing and presentation.
  • Minor corrections to the text and figures.

Information that is in the public review should not be repeated here. For example, as a general rule, concerns about a claim not being justified by the data should be explained in the public review, while specific suggestions for how the authors might address these concerns should be placed here.

However, we recognize that in some cases the best way to explain perceived flaws in an experiment or analysis is to suggest a better one, and in such cases the recommendation should be in the public review. Similarly, if there are issues of writing and presentation that are likely to lead to confusion or the drawing of incorrect conclusions by readers, these should be raised in the public review.

This section should also list any issues the authors need to address about the availability of data, code, reagents, research ethics, or other issues pertaining to the adherence of the manuscript to eLife’s publishing policies.

Examples

(The following is an example of a Public Review, using the preprint Concerted action of kinesins KIF5B and KIF13B promotes efficient secretory vesicle transport to microtubule plus ends)

Public review:

Serra-Marques, Martin et al. investigated the individual and cooperative roles of specific kinesins in transporting Rab6 secretory vesicles in HeLa cells using CRISPR/Cas knockouts and live-cell imaging. They find that both kinesin-1 KIF5B and kinesin-3 KIF13B cooperate in transporting Rab6 vesicles, but Eg5 and other kinesin-3s (KIF1B and KIF1C) are dispensable for Rab6 vesicle transport. They show that both KIF5B and KIF13B localize to these vesicles and coordinate their activities such that KIF5B is the main driver of the cargos on older, MAP7-decorated microtubules, and KIF13B takes over as the main transporter on freshly-polymerized microtubule ends that are largely devoid of MAP7. Interestingly, the data also indicate that KIF5B is important for controlling Rab6 vesicle size, which KIF13B cannot rescue. By performing a technically impressive analysis of the the motor distribution on vesicle with subpixel resolution, the authors find that the motors localize to the front of the vesicle when driving transport, but upon directional cargo switching, KIF5B but not KIF13B localizes to the back of the vesicle when opposing dynein. These data add in an interesting way to the ongoing discussion on whether motors of opposite polarity present on the same cargo engage in a tug-of-war.

The conclusions of this paper are mostly well supported by data, but some aspects of image acquisition and data analysis need to be clarified and extended.

1) The metrics used to quantify motility are sensitive to tracking errors and uncertainty. The authors quantify the number of runs (Figure 2D,F; 7C) and the average speed (Figure 3A,B,D,E,H). The number of runs is sensitive to linking errors in tracking. A single, long trajectory is often misrepresented as multiple shorter trajectories. These linking errors are sensitive to small differences in the signal-to-noise ratio between experiments and conditions, and the set of tracking parameters used. The average speed is reported only for the long, processive runs (tracks>20 frames, segments < 6 frames with velocity vector correlation >0.6). For many vesicular cargoes, these long runs represent < 10% of the total motility. In the 4X-KO cells, it is expected there is very little processive motility, yet the average speed is higher than in control cells. Frame-to-frame velocities are often overestimated due to the tracking uncertainty. To make their results more solid, the authors should have used additional metrics of vesicle motility. For example, they could have used metrics such as mean-squared displacement, which are less sensitive to tracking errors. The authors should have also provided either the average velocity of the entire run (including pauses), or the fraction of time represented by the processive segments to aid in interpreting the velocity data.

2) Adding control experiments to assess crosstalk between fluorescence images would be needed to increase confidence in the presented colocalization results.

3) The data on KIF13B-380 motility presented in Figure 8G is not sufficiently convincing. The tracks for KIF13B-380 motility are difficult to see, which is surprising as KIF13B has been shown to be a super-processive motor. Better data would have helped to substantiate the authors’ conclusions.

(The following is an example of a Public Review of the preprint Measuring Sequences of Representations with Temporally Delayed Linear Modelling)

Public review:

This work provides a new general tool for measuring rapid sequences of patterns in neural activity. Such sequences have been studied in the activity of cells in rodent hippocampus for decades (termed replay). They are suggested substrates for a number of important cognitive functions including memory consolidation, mental simulation and planning. Recently it has become possible to detect such sequences in humans using MEG and fMRI. This paper provides a modelling and inference framework for detecting such sequences from all types of data using the same approach. It should therefore allow replay to be compared more directly across species. It is also a more general technique than those typically used in rodents, so it may allow rigorous replay measurements in situations that are not currently possible.

Strengths:

Placing sequence analysis into a General linear modelling framework enables a powerful set of established tools for hypothesis testing and inference to be brought to bear on the analysis of sequences. Hypotheses about sequences can be formally expressed as regressors in a linear model. Standard tools can then be used for parametric or non-parametric inference. It allows formal approaches to address issues such as serial autocorrelations in the data, to ensure that inference is unbiased.

Because the regressors are built out of transitions from a graph, the technique is in principle amenable to measuring sequences in any situation where experiences can be expressed as a graph. This contrasts with other approaches that, for example, can only be used for rodents running along a linear track, but not in a maze or an open 2D environment. This generality in principle allows replay measurements in situations where other published techniques do not, and allows the same tools to be used to describe replay in many different situations, potentially allowing comparisons across different situations.

The technique in principle works in the same way across many different types of data giving the potential to compare more directly replay across different species where very different types of data has been acquired.

Weaknesses:

Although the paper does have strengths in principle, the weaknesses of the paper are that these strengths are not directly demonstrated. That is, insufficient analyses are performed to fully support the key claims in the manuscript by the data presented. In particular:

The authors imply the current method is superior to other methods on various different dimensions but there is very little actual comparison with other methods to substantiate this claim, particularly for sequences of more than two states which have been extensively used in the rodent replay literature (see Tingley and Peyrache, Proc Royal Soc B 2020 for a recent review of the rodent methods; different shuffling procedures are applied to identify sequenceness, see e.g., Farooq et al. Neuron 2019 and Foster, Ann Rev Neurosci 2017).

The authors claim that the method is more general than other methods on various different dimensions (ability to apply to different kinds of graphs; ability to apply to different species), but again the data supporting this claim is sparse. The method is not applied rigorously to graphs with different structure or from different species. Instead, it is applied to two MEG experiments with the same structure (linear-4 elements), and there is a small section that is very hard to understand where it is applied to rodent ePhys data. It is therefore very difficult to assess these claims.

The inference part of the work is potentially very valuable because this is an area that has been well studied in GLM/multiple regression type problems. However, the authors limit themselves to asking "first-order" sequence questions (i.e., whether observed sequenceness is different from random) when key questions, including whether or not there is evidence of replay, are actually "second-order" questions because they require a comparison of sequences across two conditions (e.g., pre-task and post-task; I'm borrowing this terminology from van der Meer et al. Proc Royal Soc B 2020). The authors do not address how to make this kind of comparison using their method.

Review Policies

Confidentiality and Co-Reviewing

Although eLife only reviews preprints and creates public reviews, other parts of the review process remain confidential and must be treated as such by reviewers during the review process and subsequently.

Co-reviewing a manuscript with a single experienced junior colleague can be an important learning experience that we are happy to support. The name of the co-referee should be disclosed in the review form. The two co-reviewers should agree on the wording of the review, and the same principles relating to confidentiality and competing interests apply to both reviewers. The senior reviewer should be the main point of contact for the discussion between the reviewers, but the senior reviewer can confer with their co-reviewer during this discussion. Other than co-reviewing for training purposes, reviewers should not contact anyone not directly involved with the assessment of the article, including colleagues or other experts in the field, unless this has been discussed and approved in advance by the Reviewing Editor.

The content of the consultation session between the reviewers is also confidential.

Reviewer Anonymity

We do not release the identities of the reviewers to the authors but in the course of the discussion that forms part of the review process, each reviewer will know the identity of the other reviewers.

We have decided not to reveal reviewer identities of Public Reviews. There are good arguments in favour of revealing the identities of all reviewers, especially the possibility that such transparency will discourage poor reviewer behavior and increase confidence in the process. However, we have heard from many scientists, especially those in early stages of their careers or otherwise in vulnerable positions, who would not feel comfortable writing honest reviews of the work of more senior colleagues if they had to identify themselves. Thus all Public Reviews will be signed by eLife and not by individuals, putting the onus on us as an organisation and community to ensure that our reviews are of the highest quality and ethics.

Competing Interests and Disclosures

We ask reviewers to recognise potential competing interests that could lead them to be positively or negatively disposed towards an article. We follow the recommendations of the ICMJE and the guidance provided by PLOS. Reviewers should inform the editors or journal staff if they are close competitors or collaborators of the authors. Reviewers must recuse themselves if they feel that they are unable to offer an impartial review. Common reasons for editors and reviewers to recuse themselves from the peer-review process include but are not limited to:

  • Working at the same institution or organization as one or more of the authors, currently or recently
  • Having collaborated with, or served as a mentor to, one or more of the authors during the past 5 years
  • Having held grants with one or more of the authors, currently or recently
  • Having a personal relationship with an author that does not allow an objective evaluation of the manuscript

We will make every effort to follow authors’ requests to exclude potential reviewers, provided that a specific reason is provided.

Accusations of Misconduct

eLife is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), supports their principles, and follows their flowcharts for dealing with potential breaches of publishing ethics. Reviewers are asked not to make allegations of misconduct within the review itself or within the online consultation, but in the event of concerns about potential plagiarism, inappropriate image manipulation, or other forms of misconduct, reviewers should alert the journal’s editorial staff in the first instance. The editorial staff will consult the Senior Editor and Reviewing Editor, and consider the concerns further.

Research conducted by eLife: As a way of improving our services, we periodically undertake research and surveys relating to eLife's submission and review process. Where appropriate we will share our findings so that others can benefit. Participation does not affect the decision on manuscripts under consideration, or our policies relating to the confidentiality of the review process. If you would like to opt out of eLife's research and/or surveys, please contact the journal office (editorial [at] elifesciences [dot] org).