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Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express: 2016 Reviewer Awards

Reviewer of the Year: Dr Samuel Pichardo, Sunnybrook Research Institute, Canada

Sitting on the frontiers of biology, physics and engineering, Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express (BPEX) provides a home for scientifically sound, but conceptually marginal, studies. Interdisciplinary research is fast becoming the norm and, according to Dr Samuel Pichardo, BPEX is gaining ground as an attractive journal for cross-disciplinary approaches.

Helping to promote interdisciplinarity is not the only reason Dr Pichardo reviews for BPEX. As politicians begin to question the reliability of scientific studies, he sees it as his responsibility to uphold scientists’ integrity through peer review. Therefore, when refereeing, he looks for robust research, clear biomedical applications and good descriptions of the engineering methods employed.

Dr Pichardo is also a fan of open access software, citing an article on numerical modelling as an excellent example of scientists disclosing their methods: TIGRE: a MATLAB-GPU toolbox for CBCT image reconstruction. Full disclosure of software methods is a step in the right direction for reproducible research, he says.

Overall, in terms of reviewing, Dr Pichardo advocates a double-anonymous review process to help mitigate bias, although he realizes that this would not eradicate it completely. He also thinks it would be useful to be able to score manuscripts according to the degree to which authors disclose their methods.

Reminding first-time reviewers that a sound paper balances innovation with an adequate disclosure of methods, Dr Pichardo’s advice is to remain humble and to bear in mind that all reviewers generally want the same thing: the publication of high-quality research.

Outstanding Reviewers:

  • Dr Lucia Billeci, CNR, Italy
  • Dr Victor Krauthamer, CDRH/OST/DPS, United States
  • Dr Michael Lewis, Swansea University, UK
  • Dr Patrick Liu, PerkinElmer, Inc, United States
  • Dr Ram Narayanan, Pennsylvania State University, United States
  • Dr Stig Ollmar, Karolinska Institute, Sweden
  • Dr Marta Parazzini, CNR Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy
  • Dr Manojit Pramanik, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Dr Dario Sanz, Fundacion Escuela de Medicina Nuclear, Argentina
  • Dr Lucia Savarino, Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute, Italy
  • Dr Sayuri Yoshizawa, University of Pittsburgh, United States
  • Dr Liang Zhang, National University of Defense Technology, China