In 2025, ATM reviewers continue to make outstanding contributions to the peer review process. They demonstrated professional effort and enthusiasm in their reviews and provided comments that genuinely help the authors to enhance their work.
Hereby, we would like to highlight some of our outstanding reviewers, with a brief interview of their thoughts and insights as a reviewer. Allow us to express our heartfelt gratitude for their tremendous effort and valuable contributions to the scientific process.
Thomas J O'Keefe, University of California, USA
Thomas J O'Keefe
Tom O’Keefe is a breast surgical oncology fellow at the University of California San Francisco. He completed a fellowship in quality and safety at the Jennifer Moreno VA Hospital in San Diego where he conducted research on half-hitch knot configurations and developed a video-based curriculum which when viewed by residents resulted in a four-fold increase in the security of their knots tied in cavities. During residency at the University of California San Diego, he spent two years in the lab of Anne Wallace and David Vera, where he developed theragnostic radiopharmaceuticals targeting breast cancer and conducted outcomes research on patients with ductal carcinoma in situ. Prior to medical school, he studied the photophysical properties of europium doped yttrium vanadate nanoparticles at École Polytechnique in Paris, France, and helped model seismic waves in an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota to assess the feasibility of underground third generation gravitational wave detectors.
ATM: What are the qualities a reviewer should possess?
Dr. O’Keefe: A reviewer must have integrity in deciding whether to accept an invitation to review a manuscript. To responsibly accept, the reviewer must possess a mastery of the subject matter relevant to the manuscript. Simply having published in the area is not a sufficient criterion—the reviewer must have a robust familiarity with the existing literature on the subject and the relative quality of the literature that is most pertinent to the manuscript. Not only must the reviewer possess a deep knowledge of this literature, but also the methods used by the paper including the specifics of any statistical tests or regression models that are employed. The merit of the work can only be appropriately assessed through this lens of expertise. Furthermore, a reviewer must have the time and energy necessary to adequately appraise the study. A hasty assessment by a subject matter expert may not be superior to a thoughtful analysis by a novice, though neither is particularly useful. The reviewer must approach the work under consideration with an open mind. Understanding the strengths and limitations of both the manuscript under consideration and the body of existing literature on the subject matter and how they interrelate is critical in deciding whether a given work warrants publication.
ATM: What do you consider as an objective review? How do you make sure your review is objective?
Dr. O’Keefe: An objective review must first assess whether the primary objective of a study can be adequately assessed with the data utilized. It must then confirm that the methods applied by the authors are appropriate for this objective and that the assumptions for all statistical tests and regression models are met. It is critical that the results are then interpreted by the reviewer in the context of the existing literature on the basis of the level of evidence of both the work under consideration and relevant existing publications. And when differences exist between studies of comparable levels of evidence, plausible explanations for the discrepancy must be considered by both reviewer and author. An objective review must finally consider the novelty of the study at hand and the meaningfulness of its contribution to the existing literature on the subject.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
