Peer Review Process

Every submission to the Medical Physics Journal that passes initial editorial screening is evaluated through double-anonymized peer review before an editorial decision is made. This is a confirmed journal policy, not a provisional arrangement.

Under this model:

• Reviewers are not told the identity of the authors.
• Authors are not told the identity of the reviewers who evaluated their manuscript.
• Author-identifying information is not made available to reviewers through the review interface, the manuscript files provided for review, or any correspondence about the review.
• Reviewer-identifying information is not made available to authors through the interface, decision letters, notifications, file metadata, or any other channel.

Anonymization is a process the journal manages carefully, not a guarantee that no identifying detail can ever be inferred from a manuscript’s content (a very narrow research niche, for example, can sometimes suggest authorship regardless of what is redacted). MPJ’s editorial and technical checks are designed to minimize this risk, not to claim it is eliminated entirely.

Authors are responsible for preparing a manuscript file suitable for anonymized review. This means removing or generalizing, from the version sent to reviewers:

• Author names, affiliations, and contact details in the title page, headers, or footers.
• Acknowledgments and funding statements that name individuals, institutions, or grant numbers that would identify the author group.
• Self-referential language (“as we previously showed in [citation]”) that identifies the authors through their own prior work.
• Identifying details in file properties and document metadata (author name embedded in a Word or PDF file’s properties, for example).
• Tracked changes, comments, or version history left in the file that could reveal an editing history tied to named individuals.
• Identifying information in supplementary files, datasets, or code repositories submitted alongside the manuscript.

Author-identifying information (the title page, author list, affiliations, and ORCID iDs) is collected separately during submission and is not included in the file reviewers see. The technical check at submission includes a review for the items above before a manuscript is sent to reviewers; this is an editorial safeguard, not a substitute for the author’s own care in preparing the file.

After passing technical and editorial screening, a submission is assigned to a handling editor, who invites reviewers with relevant expertise. Reviewers evaluate originality, methodological soundness, clarity, and the adequacy of the manuscript’s references, and submit a recommendation to the handling editor: accept, minor revision, major revision, reject, or resubmit for further review.

The handling editor weighs the reviews received — not simply counts them — and communicates a decision to the author, generally with reviewer comments included. Reviewer comments intended only for the editor are never forwarded to the author.

Manuscripts under review are confidential. Reviewers may not share a manuscript, discuss its contents, or use unpublished data or ideas from it for their own advantage. Editors and reviewers with a conflict of interest regarding a submission — including having recently collaborated with the authors — are expected to decline the assignment.

Authors who believe a decision was made in error, or that a review contained a substantive factual mistake, may request a reconsideration. See Complaints & Appeals for how to do this.