Reviewer Guideline

Reviewer Guidelines

Thank you

Peer review is unpaid, largely invisible work, and the quality of this journal depends on it. We ask reviewers for a judgement they would be willing to put their name to, delivered on time and written in language an author can act on.

Before you accept

Please accept or decline within 10 days of the invitation. Declining quickly is more helpful than accepting and delaying; where you decline, suggesting an alternative reviewer is appreciated.

Decline if:

• The subject falls outside your area of competence. Partial expertise is fine if you tell us which parts you can assess for example, the clinical content but not the statistical analysis.
• You have a competing interest. This includes co-authorship or collaboration with any author in the past three years, shared institutional affiliation, a supervisory or mentoring relationship, personal conflict, direct competition with the work, or any financial interest in the outcome. If you are uncertain, disclose it to the editor and let them decide.

If you recognise the authors despite anonymisation, tell the editor. It does not automatically disqualify you, but the editor needs to know.

Confidentiality

The manuscript is a confidential document. Do not share it, cite it, quote it, or use its findings to inform your own work before publication. Do not discuss it with colleagues without the editor's permission, and do not retain a copy after the review is submitted.

If you wish to involve a junior colleague as a training exercise, request the editor's approval first and name them in your report so their contribution can be recognised.

Do not upload any part of the manuscript, its figures, or your report to an AI chatbot, translation service, or any other external tool. Doing so places unpublished work outside the journal's control and breaches the confidentiality of the review process. AI tools may not be used to generate a review. Limited use for polishing the language of a report you have written yourself is acceptable and should be disclosed to the editor.

What we ask you to assess

Relevance and contribution. Does the work address a question that matters to nursing practice with children, and does it add to what is already known? A well-executed study that answers a question no one is asking is still not publishable here.

Methods. This is where most of your effort should go.

• Is the design capable of answering the stated question?
• Sampling: how were participants selected, is the sample size justified, and is attrition accounted for?
• Are instruments valid and reliable in the population studied, and were permissions obtained?
• For trials: randomisation and allocation concealment, blinding where feasible, fidelity of the intervention, prospective registration, agreement between registered and reported outcomes.
• For qualitative work: coherence between the stated approach and what was actually done, sampling and saturation, analytic process, reflexivity, and whether the interpretation is supported by the data presented.
• For reviews: search strategy, screening and extraction procedures, risk-of-bias assessment, appropriateness of synthesis.
• Statistics: appropriate to the data structure, assumptions checked, effect sizes and confidence intervals reported rather than p-values alone, multiplicity addressed.

Ethics. Confirm that ethics approval, parental or guardian consent, and child assent are documented. Consider whether the procedures were appropriate for children burden, ability to withdraw, and management of distress. Raise any concern about participant safety directly with the editor, even if you would otherwise recommend acceptance.

Results. Are they reported completely and consistently between text, tables and figures? Are the numbers internally coherent? Are tables and figures necessary, or duplicative of the text?

Discussion and conclusions. Are the claims proportionate to the design? Watch for causal language applied to correlational findings, over-generalisation from a single site, and limitations acknowledged but then ignored in the conclusion.

Implications for practice. Concrete and grounded in the findings, not a generic call for further research.

Reporting. Does the manuscript follow the guideline appropriate to its design (CONSORT, PRISMA, STROBE, COREQ, SQUIRE 2.0, CARE)?

References. Note any citation that appears not to support the claim made, or that you cannot locate. Fabricated or inaccurate references are increasingly common and are treated seriously.

We do not ask you to correct English or formatting. Note whether the language impedes understanding; the rest is handled in production.

Writing the report

Structure your report in three parts:

1. A short summary of what the study did and found, in your own words. This tells the editor you have read it and shows the authors how their work reads to an informed outsider.
2. Major points — issues that affect the validity of the findings or the soundness of the conclusions, numbered.
3. Minor points — clarifications, wording, inconsistencies, presentation, numbered with page and line references.

Be specific. "The methods are unclear" cannot be acted on; "the sample size calculation on page 6 assumes a medium effect, but the cited pilot study reported a small one" can. Where you identify a problem, say whether it is fixable and how.

Address the manuscript, never the authors. Sharp criticism of the work is welcome; dismissive or personal remarks are not, and the editors will ask you to rewrite them. Assume the authors have worked hard and in good faith.

Confidential comments to the editor are for concerns you should not put to the authors directly suspected plagiarism, duplicate publication, data irregularities, undisclosed conflicts, or ethical concerns. Do not place your recommendation there and a contradictory message in the report to the authors.

Recommendations

The recommendation is advisory. The handling editor weighs all reviews and the final decision rests with the Editor-in-Chief, so your report may not match the outcome.

Timeline and re-review

Reviews are due within 10 days of acceptance. Tell us early if you need an extension; we can usually accommodate one.

If you reviewed the original submission, we will normally ask you to look at the revision. Please confine yourself to whether your earlier points were addressed. Introducing new major criticisms at the second round, on material that was in the first version, delays authors unfairly.