Reviewers should recognize, acknowledge and disclose any potential conflict of interest that may include (but not be limited) to the following, and inform the editorial office immediately upon discovery of any conflict of interest, stopping if the article review process is underway.

Close personal and/or professional relationship with the author(s); submitted similar or competing manuscripts to BPG or other journals; studied together with the author(s) and/or has former student, resident, fellow, mentor or family relative relationship; and have had in last 5 years collaboration or common grants and/or publications or financial interest with the authors?

The mission of BPG is to comply with publishing ethics/standards established by the industry and to publish high quality articles. In addition, we strive to make a strict peer-review of each article submitted, and tracking the scientific quality of each is the mission of the editorial board members and/or peer-reviewers.

The following evaluation points are for editorial board members and/or peer-reviewers’ reference only in evaluating an article:

1 Ethics: Does the ethical approval form provided by the author meet the requirements?

2 Methods: Is the experimental method effective? Can it be repeated by fellow researchers (according to adequate textual/citation content presented)?

3 Results: Are the results true and authentic? Is the theory or hypothesis of universal significance validated or partially validated?

4 Figures and tables: Does the author provide perfect tables, line charts and/or graphs? Or, does the author provide figures and tables that are confusing, poorly constructed and/or not well-annotated?

5 Biostatistics: Does the author provide perfect biostatistics data? Or, does the author provide tables and line charts that have mistakes in the data?

6 References: Does the author scientifically and reasonably cite the latest references which are important in this field and related to the scientific problems and research hypotheses addressed in the study? Or, does the author self-cite, omit, mis-cite and/or over-cite references?

7 Language: Does the language in article correctly, clearly and concisely express the information? Or, does the article have multiple grammatical and spelling mistakes?

8 Caveats or drawbacks: What are the caveats or drawbacks for the results?

Please make a specific and meaningful evaluation on the objectivity, credibility and scientific quality of the article according to above listed criteria. Please identify which issues have been resolved by the author and which not, what problems still exist, and which method the author intends to adopt to solve the problem in the next step, etc. Your high quality conclusion will also be advantageous for the author’s efforts in conducting future research, will contribute to raising the reader’s interest, and will promote discipline development. Please fill in your detailed comments to authors at below:

1 Award aims: To praise the authors who have made outstanding contributions by publishing original and innovative Basic study, Clinical study, Case report and/or Review in any of the 43 open-access publications of BPG. Their publications represent meaningful contributions towards promoting the ability of readers to get the latest research results and towards the development of medical science. To thank such authors for their contributions, we have set up the ‘Baishideng Distinguished Award’ to track the quality of articles and award the corresponding authors.

2 Selection methods: Editorial board members will track the quality of the published articles in each issue, so that they can recognize excellent articles and categorize them for recommendation. Then, the annual Baishideng Distinguished Award winners will be selected according to the recommendation categories and the academic influence of the articles. The indexes for academic influence of the articles involves the number of citations, clicks and downloads the paper received.

3 Number of awards: Among articles published in the 43 journals of BPG, 12 total articles (3 Reviews, 3 Basic studies, 3 Clinical studies and 3 Case reports) will be recognized and their authors awarded.

4 Award amounts: The first prize will be 5000 USD. The second prize will be 3000 USD. The third prize will be 2000 USD. In addition, each winner will be presented an official certificate for their Baishideng Distinguished Award.

5 List of winners: The list of Baishideng Distinguished Award winners will be announced on the official BPG website.

Editorial board members and/or peer-reviewers should categorize articles according to the following recommendation categories, with consideration to results of the Track Article Quality assessment to identify excellent articles: