Introduction: Peer-review is one of the important pre-publication steps for academic papers. It usually assures the readers about the high-quality reporting of scientific findings. Since objective and subjective criteria used by the reviewers are effective factors on the quality of journal, this study aims to assess these criteria for the accepted and rejected manuscripts of Journal Health Administration.
Methods: We used both quantitative and qualitative methods in this study. Mentioned items in peer-review checklist were considered as objective criteria and content analysis used to get the subjective criteria from reviewers’ comments. Peer-review checklists of accepted or rejected manuscripts between 2011 and 2013 (330 manuscripts) were the sample of this cross-sectional study.
Results: There were 10 sets containing 29 subsets for objective criteria and 224 subsets for subjective criteria beside 1978 comments from reviewers. Problem statement, data gathering methods, compatibility of discussion with findings, and ethical issues were the main criteria which were different between accepted and rejected papers.
Conclusion: Variation of subjective criteria in reviewers’ comments makes the process of decision making more complicated for the editors. So, we tried to include all of the obtained objective and subjective criteria in one peer-review checklist to help the reviewers in assessing the papers.

Keywords: Assessment of Papers, Peer-Review, Quality of Publication, Academic Publications

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