For Reviewers
What to check before accepting, what to assess and in what order, the specific weaknesses obesity manuscripts most often carry, and how to write a report an author can act on.
ISSN 2574-450X Review single-blind or double-blind on request Reports advise; editors decide
Before you accept
Three questions, answered before you read the manuscript.
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01
Can you assess this manuscript?
Not the subject area — this manuscript. A dietary intervention needs someone who can judge adherence measurement; a pharmacotherapy trial needs someone who can judge safety reporting; a surgical series needs someone who can judge follow-up completeness. If you can assess part of it, say which part and accept on that basis; a partial review that is honest about its limits is more useful than a confident one that is not.
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02
Do you have a conflict?
Decline where you have an institutional, financial, commercial or personal interest — including any interest in the medication, device, program, procedure or product under study, recent co-authorship with the authors, or a competing manuscript of your own in the same question. Declaring an interest and reviewing anyway is not the same as declining.
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03
Can you do it in the time?
If not, decline promptly and, if you can, name someone who could. A quick decline is worth more to the authors than a slow acceptance.
What to assess
Apply the checks relevant to the manuscript’s design and purpose. Scope, methodological soundness and reporting are assessed without imposing clinical or statistical requirements on every form of research.
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01
Scope and contribution
Does the manuscript address a substantive obesity question, including a focused subgroup or effect-modification analysis? Incidental recording of body weight does not establish fit. What does this add to what is already known, and is that stated accurately rather than overstated?
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02
Design
Could this design answer this question? Was the comparator appropriate? Was the sampling or sample-size rationale appropriate? Assess precision or power where applicable to quantitative designs; for qualitative and model-based work, assess sampling, assumptions and evaluation appropriate to the question.
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03
Conduct and measurement
Were the outcomes pre-specified? How was each measured, with what instrument, and over what follow-up? How much attrition was there, and how were missing data handled? Is participant flow reported?
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04
Analysis
Are the statistical methods appropriate and described well enough to repeat? Are effect sizes and measures of precision reported, rather than p values alone? Are subgroup analyses labeled as pre-specified or exploratory?
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05
Interpretation
Does the conclusion follow from the result, at the strength the design supports? Are limitations stated concretely rather than as a formality? Does the abstract match the paper?
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06
Ethics and reporting
Ethics approval and consent where required; trial registration for an interventional trial; a data-availability statement; the reporting checklist for the design; funding and competing interests declared in full.
What this field asks you to watch
The specific things that most often go wrong in obesity manuscripts. Use whichever apply.
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Every manuscript
Outcome measures are not interchangeable
- Weight, body mass index, body composition, waist and regional measures, metabolic outcomes and clinical outcomes are different things. Check that the paper distinguishes them and that the conclusion refers to the one actually measured.
- Check the follow-up interval and retention at each time point. A result at twelve weeks should not be discussed as a durable one.
- Watch for a change in weight being presented as an improvement in health where no health outcome was measured.
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Clinical and weight-management studies
Selection through to safety
- How participants were selected and how representative they are; the comparator and whether it was a fair one; duration and follow-up; whether the outcomes are clinically meaningful rather than only statistically significant; adverse events; attrition and whether those who left differed from those who stayed.
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Nutrition and dietary intervention
Exposure, adherence, confounding
- Is the dietary intervention described well enough to reproduce? How was adherence measured and what was it? Was energy intake measured where it bears on the interpretation? Was confounding by other simultaneous behavior change addressed? Are the endpoints appropriate to a dietary question?
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Physical activity and exercise
Prescription and adherence
- Modality, intensity, frequency, duration and progression; supervision; adherence; and the method used to measure any body-composition outcome.
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Behavioral and psychological intervention
Model, measurement, durability
- Is the behavior-change model or technique specified? Who delivered it, with what training, in what dose? How were outcomes defined and measured, and by whom? Is there follow-up beyond the end of the intervention, and is any effect sustained?
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Pharmacotherapy
Safety and interests, not just efficacy
- Dose, titration, duration, comparator; discontinuation and the reasons for it; adverse events in full, including those that led to withdrawal; weight change after discontinuation where followed; and the funding source and any interest in the agent, its manufacturer or a competitor. Check whether the harms are reported with the same care as the benefits.
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Bariatric, metabolic and endoscopic procedures
Completeness above all
- Procedure and variant; selection criteria; the number approached and treated; complications by severity; reoperation and revision; and the completeness of follow-up at each time point. Incomplete long-term follow-up is the most common weakness in this literature — say so where you see it.
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Every manuscript
Language and populations
- Flag terminology that frames obesity as a personal failing or as a matter of appearance.
- Flag any material from which a participant could be identified.
- Where children, adolescents or other vulnerable participants are involved, check that assent and consent are evidenced.
Writing the report
What makes a report useful to the authors and to the editor.
Open with two or three sentences on what the study did and what you take its main finding to be. That tells the editor whether you and the authors understood the paper the same way.
Then separate the points that must be addressed for the work to be sound from those that would improve it. Number them, refer to the section or line, and say what would satisfy each. "The methods are unclear" cannot be acted on; "state how adherence was measured and report it by group" can.
Where you recommend rejection, say why in terms the authors can learn from. Where you are uncertain, say so rather than hedging — an editor can weigh stated uncertainty and cannot weigh a hedge.
Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
Your report advises the editor; it does not decide the manuscript. Recommend, and leave the decision to the handling editor.
Confidentiality, AI and conduct
The obligations that come with seeing unpublished work.
- Confidentiality
- A manuscript under review is confidential. Do not share it, discuss its contents outside the review, or use unpublished material in your own work. If you want a colleague or a trainee to contribute to the review, ask the editor first and name them.
- Files
- After submitting the review, reviewers should securely delete downloaded manuscript files and must not retain or use unpublished material.
- Double-blind manuscripts
- For double-blind manuscripts, reviewers must not attempt to identify the authors.
- Artificial intelligence
- Reviewers must obtain journal permission before using AI to assist with a review. Any permitted use must be disclosed, and confidential manuscript content must not be uploaded where confidentiality cannot be assured.
- Conflicts arising mid-review
- If you realize during the review that you have a conflict, stop and tell the editor.
- Suspected misconduct
- If you suspect plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabrication, image manipulation or an undisclosed conflict, report it to the editor rather than confronting it in the report to the authors.
Reviewing for the journal
How to offer, and what the journal offers in return.
Researchers and clinicians working anywhere across the journal’s aims and scope are invited to join the reviewer pool. Write to [email protected] with a current institutional affiliation, an ORCID iD, and the methods and subject areas you are willing to assess. Being specific about method as well as subject is what makes an invitation match your expertise.
Reviewers are matched to manuscripts they are equipped to assess and are informed of the editorial outcome. Reviewing confers no advantage in the assessment or acceptance of a reviewer’s own submissions and does not alter applicable fees.
Journal of Obesity Management (JOM) · ISSN 2574-450X · Crossref DOI prefix 10.14302 · published open access by Open Access Pub under CC BY 4.0, authors retain copyright · editorial policies · aims and scope.