Become a reviewer
Why do we need reviewers?
NIHR Evidence publishes short, accessible summaries of NIHR-funded research. Comments from reviewers include health and care professionals, as well as people with lived experience, carers and other members of the public. We value our reviewers’ thoughts on how research impacts them, and they help us decide whether to develop a summary of a piece of research.
If you would like to share your views on research and help others understand its impact, become a reviewer.
Please note that we offer some reviewers a small honorarium for each completed review. Please see our Payment Policy for further information.
What do reviewers do?
If we approach you to review a paper for us, we will send you the details of the paper we’d like you to look at, along with a form with a few questions to complete. If you have signed up as a public reviewer, we will also send you our summary of the paper. Often it is enough to just read our summary or the abstract, and we expect the task to take about 30 minutes in total.
We aim to send you papers on topics you are interested in; and we only contact many of our reviewers once or twice a year. Please note that you do not have to provide a review just because you’ve signed up. You can decline to review any paper and still remain on our database.
For more information on being a reviewer, please see the Reviewer Guidelines or contact us at Evidence@nihr.ac.uk.
Register to become a reviewer here
Other opportunities to get involved in research
Your experience of your own care, or the care of others, is of great value to researchers. Researchers may have textbook knowledge about different conditions, but they have gaps in their understanding if they have not also lived through it.
Members of the public can work alongside researchers to help shape:
- what research gets done
- how it is carried out
- how the results are shared and applied in practice.
By getting involved in research, you can help make research more relevant and useful to patients, carers and the public.