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Peer Reviews (9)

Published on in Vol 1 (2023)

Preprints (earlier versions) of this paper are available at https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/50624, first published .
Peer Review of “The Loch Ness Monster: If It’s Real, Could It Be an Eel?”

Peer Review of “The Loch Ness Monster: If It’s Real, Could It Be an Eel?”

Peer Review of “The Loch Ness Monster: If It’s Real, Could It Be an Eel?”

Authors of this article:

Derek W Evans1 Author Orcid Image
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    Peer-Review Report


    This is a peer-review report submitted for the paper “The Loch Ness Monster: If It’s Real, Could It Be an Eel?”


    General Assessment

    Interesting paper [1] and a useful attempt at answering a cryptozoological question using real data, although some of the data used is not quite relevant to the cold waters of Ness. There was no Figure 2 included with the manuscript. A description of eel behavior outlining how they do not swim upward and out of the water akin to “Nessie” breaching would be useful.

    Essential Revisions That Are Required to Verify the Manuscript

    A map of locations. Corrected inclusion of Figure 2. Some wider eel biometric data such as that to be found in any of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea Working Group on Eels’ annual reports; reference to The Eel by Tesch and Thorpe [2] for comments on eel behavior and comments on biometry.

    Other Suggestions to Improve the Manuscript

    Inclusion of some images of very large 1 m plus eels for comparative purposes.

    Decision

    Verified with reservations: The content is academically sound but has shortcomings that could be improved by further studies or minor revisions based on the edits suggested above.


    The great inclusions and revisions certainly make the paper a finished article and a genuinely interesting read—print as seen.

    Decision Changed

    Verified.

    Conflicts of Interest

    None declared.

    Editorial Notice

    This paper was peer-reviewed by the Plan P Hashtag Community partner #PeerRef.

    1. Foxon F. The Loch Ness monster: if it's real, could it be an eel? JMIRx Bio. 2023:e49063. [CrossRef]
    2. Tesch FW, Thorpe JE, editors. The Eel. Hoboken, NJ. John Wiley & Sons; 2003;1-71.

    Edited by G Eysenbach; This is a non–peer-reviewed article. submitted 06.07.23; accepted 06.07.23; published 21.07.23.

    Copyright

    ©Derek W Evans. Originally published in JMIRx Bio (https://bio.jmirx.org), 21.07.2023.

    This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIRx Bio, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://bio.jmirx.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.