About the Journal

About HMSR

The Harvard Medical Student Review (HMSR) is a student-founded, student-run, open access medical journal established in 2014 at Harvard Medical School. Our mission is to provide a rigorous, trainee-centered platform for scholarly dialogue on topics spanning clinical medicine, basic and translational science, health policy, ethics, global health, medical education, public health, and health equity. We welcome a wide range of formats—including original research and quality improvement reports, narrative and systematic reviews, perspectives and editorials, case discussions, as well as poetry, prose, and visual artwork that illuminate the human side of medicine. Submissions are invited from medical students and trainees across health professions and related graduate programs worldwide.

HMSR is fully open access: all articles are freely available online without subscription fees or paywalls, and there are no article processing charges for authors. We are committed to transparent editorial practices, attention to research and publication ethics, and a mentored review process that supports the development of early-career authors and reviewers. The journal is managed by a student Executive Board—currently Editor-in-Chief Arya Rao; Executive Editors Cameron Young and Keegan Mendez; Directors of Internal Affairs Seerat Chawla and Lynn Bi; Outreach Director Anna Wadhwa; and Production Director Sam Steuart.

Interested in submitting to HMSR? We encourage you to review our Submission Guidelines and access our submission portal.

Peer Review Process

The Harvard Medical Student Review employs a rigorous peer review process to ensure the quality and integrity of published work.

Review Process

  • All submissions undergo initial editorial screening
  • Manuscripts are reviewed by at least 2 independent reviewers
  • Single-blind peer review
  • Reviewers assess originality, methodology, significance, and clarity
  • Authors receive feedback within 12 weeks
  • Final decision by Editor-in-Chief

Criteria for Publication

  • Scientific rigor and validity
  • Originality and significance
  • Clear writing and presentation
  • Ethical compliance
  • Relevance to medical education and health sciences

Online First and Article Versions

HMSR publishes accepted articles online ahead of the issue they will appear in. An article enters Online First only after it has completed the peer review process described above and been accepted by the Editor-in-Chief; nothing is posted before review.

What an Online First article is

The file published in Online First is the accepted manuscript. It has been peer reviewed and accepted, but has not yet been copyedited, typeset, or paginated, and it carries no volume, issue, or page numbers. Every page is marked Article in Press so that readers can tell at a glance which version they are reading.

Citing an Online First article

Each Online First article is assigned a DOI and registered with Crossref on the day it appears, so it is permanently citable from that date. Please cite it in the form: Author(s). Title. Harvard Medical Student Review. Published online [date]. doi:[DOI].

The version of record

When the article has been copyedited and assigned to an issue, the final version of record replaces the accepted manuscript at the same DOI and the same URL, so citations and links made during the Online First period continue to work. The article’s publication history records both the date it first appeared online and the date the version of record was published, and the Crossref record is updated with the volume, issue, and page numbers at that point.

Corrections and withdrawals

An Online First article is part of the published record. If an error is found, it is handled under the corrections procedures in our publication ethics policy rather than by quietly replacing the file; if an article is withdrawn after appearing online, its DOI continues to resolve to a notice explaining the withdrawal.

Open Access Policy

The Harvard Medical Student Review is committed to open access publishing. All articles are freely available to read, download, and share immediately upon publication.

Licensing

Articles are published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license, allowing for broad reuse with proper attribution.

Article Processing Charges

HMSR does not charge authors any submission or publication fees.

Copyright

Authors retain copyright of their work while granting HMSR first publication rights.

Author Fees

HMSR charges authors nothing at any stage. There are no submission fees, no article processing charges, no page charges, no colour charges, and no fees for supplementary material or for accessing published work. Because no charges apply, no waiver policy is needed.

Publication Ethics

HMSR follows the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). As a journal run by and for trainees, we treat ethical conduct as part of the education we provide, and we expect the following of everyone involved.

Authors

  • Submitted work must be original, must not be under consideration elsewhere, and must not have been published previously except as a preprint or conference abstract, which must be disclosed.
  • Everyone listed as an author must have made a substantive contribution to the work and must have approved the submitted version.
  • All sources must be cited, including the authors’ own prior work.
  • Funding sources and any financial or non-financial conflicts of interest must be disclosed at submission.
  • Research involving human participants or animals must state the approving ethics committee and confirm that informed consent was obtained.
  • Case reports and any material containing identifiable patient information require written consent to publish.

Editors and Reviewers

  • Submissions are treated as confidential and are not shared or discussed outside the review process.
  • Decisions are made on scholarly merit alone, without regard to the authors’ identity, institution, nationality, or seniority.
  • Editors and reviewers recuse themselves where a conflict of interest exists, including submissions from close collaborators or from their own institution where that creates a conflict.
  • Unpublished material from a submission may not be used in a reviewer’s or editor’s own work.
  • Editors who are themselves authors on a submission take no part in its review or in the decision.

Misconduct

Allegations of plagiarism, data fabrication or falsification, image manipulation, undisclosed conflicts, duplicate submission, or authorship disputes are investigated using the relevant COPE flowcharts. Where a concern is substantiated after publication, HMSR issues a correction, an expression of concern, or a retraction, linked to and from the original article so that the published record remains transparent.

Originality and Plagiarism

Every manuscript is checked for originality and for undisclosed prior publication during initial editorial screening, before it is sent for peer review. Manuscripts containing plagiarised or improperly attributed material are declined, and concerns raised after publication are handled under the misconduct procedures above. HMSR is in the process of adding automated text-similarity screening to this step.

Use of Generative AI

Generative AI tools cannot be credited as authors, because they cannot take responsibility for the work. Authors who use such tools in preparing a manuscript — for drafting, editing, analysis, or figure generation — must disclose this in the methods or acknowledgements, and remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, and integrity of everything they submit. Reviewers and editors must not upload manuscripts or any part of them into generative AI tools, as doing so breaches the confidentiality of the review process.

Special Issues

Special issues are proposed and overseen by the Executive Board and follow exactly the same peer review process, acceptance criteria, and ethics policies as regular issues. Where guest editors are appointed, they are named in the issue and take no part in decisions on their own submissions.

Archiving and Preservation

Every HMSR article is assigned a DOI registered with Crossref, and its metadata is deposited with Crossref on publication, so that articles remain discoverable and citable at a persistent address. Article metadata is also exposed for harvesting through the journal’s OAI-PMH interface. HMSR is in the process of joining the PKP Preservation Network for long-term preservation of full-text content; this section will be updated when those deposits begin.

Repository and Self-Archiving

Authors may deposit the submitted version, the accepted manuscript, and the final published version of their work in any institutional or subject repository, or on a personal or departmental website, at any time and with no embargo. We ask only that the published version be cited and linked to its DOI.