Focus and Scope

The Bladder (ISSN 2327-2120) is an international, open-access journal committed to publishing top-quality peer-reviewed articles describing basic laboratory, translational, and clinical investigations in the broad fields of bladder biology and diseases, including benign and malignant conditions. Subject areas covered by BLADDER include, but are not limited to:

• Anatomy
• Development
• Diseases of the bladder and urinary tract covering by urothelium
• Epidemiology
• Etiology
• Genomics and precision medicine
• neurophysiology
• urinary-based liquid biopsies

Peer Review Process

BLADDER is committed to providing authors with fast, rigorous, constructive and fair reviews.  BLADDER uses single blind peer review, where reviewers remain anonymous. The peer review process is made up of several stages.

Initial Quality Check

The journal staff performs an initial quality check to ensure minimum formatting requirements stated in Author Guidelines are met. At this stage, we also check for potential issues such as competing interest and incompliance with editorial policies and ethical standards.

Initial Assessment

Once the manuscripts have passed the quality check, they will be initially evaluated by the Editors-in-Chief or the Executive Editor to determine whether they should be sent out for review by external referees based on scientific merit and technical quality of the manuscripts.  If the manuscripts are out of scope or fall short of scientific standards set by BLADDER, they may be rejected outright without being reviewed any further.

External Review

Manuscripts that successfully go through the initial assessment will be assigned to a subject expert in our team of Editors to oversee the review process. At least three external referees will be invited and assigned the manuscript based on their expertise. At submission, authors are encouraged to suggest editorial members and at least five potential reviewers who are qualified to provide an independent assessment of the manuscript. Authors should not suggest colleagues who work in the same institution as themselves or recent collaborators. In the cover letter, authors may also identify individuals who should be excluded as a reviewer and give the reason for the exclusion. External peer reviewers typically have 14 days to submit their reviews.

Submissions determined not to be reviewed by editors will be returned to authors and will in general not be considered again unless substantial revision has been made. Resubmitted papers will be considered as a new submission. For peer-reviewed papers, a decision of either acceptance, acceptance after revision, reconsideration after revision, or rejection will be made by editors based on the evaluation of referees.  The handling editor sends a decision email to the corresponding author along with reviewers’ comments.

Revisions

If a manuscript has been determined to be acceptable pending major revision, the authors will have 30 days to revise their manuscript unless extension request is granted by the editor.

Acceptance

It is typical that multiple rounds of reviews may be needed for authors to address concerns raised by reviewers. When all issues have been satisfactorily addressed, the handling editor will issue an editorial accept and the manuscript is ready to move on to production phase.

Pre-submission inquiries are welcome but not required if authors would like to find out if their paper is suitable for publication in Bladder before submitting a full manuscript for peer review.

Publication Frequency

Individual articles will be published as soon as they are ready and will be added to the "current" volume's Table of Contents.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.