Confidential Comments to the Editor

After providing your comments to the authors, you have the option of providing confidential comments to the editor. As with the comments to the authors, you can choose to paste these comments into the box provided or upload a file from your computer.

Confidential comments to the editor need only be provided if there are concerns that should be dealt with confidentially, such as:

• Possible author misconduct, including plagiarism, self-plagiarism, duplicate submission, data or image manipulation, or data fabrication or falsification
• Comments that reference the work of your own research group in a way that would compromise the confidentiality of your review
• Comments to inform the Editor of possible conflict of interest issues that you may have as a reviewer.

Comments that provide essential criticisms of the manuscript should not be included here. Rather, those criticisms should be provided in the comments to the authors, to ensure that the authors can view and respond to the comments.