Cureus Honors is Cureus' points-based rewards program for active authors, reviewers, and readers. You earn points for actions like publishing, reviewing, and rating articles, then climb through four tiers to unlock benefits.
In this guide, you'll learn:
Cureus Honors is a points-based rewards program designed to recognize and reward people who actively contribute to the journal and community. Rather than rewarding spending, it rewards participation, publishing your research, reviewing the work of your peers, scoring articles, and keeping your profile and engagement active.
As you accumulate points, you reach one of four tiers, each unlocking progressively better perks. If you publish, review, or read on Cureus, you're already eligible for rewards you may not be using.
The tiers, from entry level to the most prestigious, are Scholar, Magna, Summa, and Laureate. Point values are deliberately hidden, but Cureus is transparent about the relative weighting: higher-effort actions are worth far more. For example, publishing an article is worth five times the points of submitting advisory feedback, while smaller actions like completing your profile or scoring articles with SIQ earn a lesser, but still substantial, amount.
Each calendar year is split into two six-month windows: January through June and July through December.
Progress toward the Scholar, Magna, and Summa tiers resets at the end of each window, so you need to stay active within a window to reach or maintain those tiers. The exception is Laureate: your progress toward Laureate status never resets.
Benefits grow as you move up the tiers. Across the program, perks can include:
Laureate is the program's highest honor, and it works differently from the others. Because progress toward it never resets, it rewards long-term contribution rather than a single active window. To be eligible, you must publish at least one article as the submitting author and complete five peer reviews. Laureates enjoy a full list of permanent benefits. One important caveat: rejected peer reviews may result in permanent loss of Laureate status, so quality matters as much as quantity.
A: Yes. Points come from several actions, not just publishing, completing peer reviews, scoring articles with SIQ, submitting advisory feedback, and completing your profile all count. Publishing is only a hard requirement for Laureate eligibility.
A: Only the submitting author. Both the Preferred Editing discount and the Expedited PMC discount are limited to the author who submits the article, and the Preferred Editing discount can't be combined with other offers.
A: On your Cureus profile, which shows your current rewards status and tier.
*This post was drafted with AI assistance and edited by our team before publishing.