Reviewer of the month August 2022

We are proud to announce that the Reviewer of the Month Award for August 2022 goes to Andreas Schwingshackl, MD PhD.

As a means to promote the hard work and dedication invested “behind the scenes” in order to improve scientific publications, each month, BJBMS Editors select a reviewer who performed the best amongst all the reviewers in the current month. Selection is based on the quality, thoroughness, and the timeliness of the review. It is a difficult task for our Editors, as they try not to underestimate the time and efforts of each of the reviewers who reviewed for the BJBMS in the current month.

Dr. Andreas Schwingshackl, a practicing Critical Care Medicine clinician-scientist, has a particular research interest in identifying new therapeutic interventions and molecular targets for rational drug design against Acute Lung Injury (ALI) and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), focusing on approaches that manipulate the resting plasma membrane potential (Em) of lung resident and immune/inflammatory cells as a mechanism to protect against ALI/ARDS-induced lung injury.

We asked Dr. Schwingshackl about the importance and other aspects of the peer-review process in general:

The importance of peer-review has never been more obvious than with what we have witnessed during the Covid pandemic, when press releases, opinion articles, blogs etc. became the major source of information for experts and lay personnel alike. Scientific peer-review remains the gold-standard of assessing the validity and strength of research data. To optimize this crucial process, we must strive to find ways to accelerate the turnaround time of manuscripts. Interactive forums/chat rooms, like e.g. with Frontiers, where reviewers and authors can discuss comments and critiques before submitting the final rebuttal, are very helpful in streamlining this process.

BJBMS congratulates Andreas Schwingshackl, MD PhD, and wishes him many awards and recognitions in the future.