Exactly How We Read Your Work
This is the full 600-point rubric a nipcr reviewer scores against. Nothing here is applied differently behind the scenes — if you can meet this checklist, you already know what your report will say.
How Scoring Works
Every manuscript is read by two or three reviewers. They score it independently against this rubric — none of them can see another's scores or notes until their own are submitted — and your score is the mean of what they give each section. The report names the spread between them, so you can see how much they agreed.
The finished Review Report — scores, section breakdown, and every reviewer's written notes — is downloadable by anyone from the public Review Log. That is what makes a result checkable rather than something you have to take our word for. Reviewers write knowing this, and are named in it only as “Reviewer 1/2/3”.
A score of 520 out of 600 (86.6%) clears our threshold for methodological rigor. Below that, the report is still detailed and useful — it means the reviewers found real, specific gaps worth fixing. A failure in Section 1 (formatting) caps the maximum possible score at 500, since basic reproducibility and structure come before anything else.
Manuscripts without a working link to open-source code and accessible data score very low here, regardless of how novel the idea is. This is the single most common reason for a low score.