Peer Review in PLoS Medicine 英文参考文献.docVIP

Editorial Peer Review in PLoS Medicine The PLoS Medicine Editors S kill in scienti?c peer review may be as ill de?ned and hard to impart as is “common sense” [1]. was primarily to con?rm the intended rejection of papers that seemed bizarre, but arguably such a system allowed the publication of very innovative ideas too. Some have argued that today the “refereeing process works primarily to enforce orthodoxy” [8], and it is certainly true that a paper can be “refereed to death.” in house editors are joined in this decision-making process by academic editors—generally members of our editorial board, but sometimes other academics—who advise us throughout the peer-review process.) As authors know to their frustration, on occasion a single review in one direction can weigh more heavily than two or more reviews in the other; editorial decisions are not made by counting beans but by taking many factors into account. The reviewers’ comments are important, but so are the overall aims of the journal and other manuscripts submitted. So say Michael Callaham and John Tercier, the authors of a research paper published in this month’s issue of PLoS Medicine, which assessed 2,856 reviews of 306 experienced reviewers at one well-regarded specialty journal. The study concluded that the only signi?cant positive predictors of review quality were reviewers who were less than 10 years out of training or those that worked in a teaching hospital environment. But, despite its shortcomings, peer review of one sort or another has become an essential tool to help editors make decisions about the quality of manuscripts and their suitability for a particular journal. Peer review can take on different forms, and even among the smallish group of “general” journals there has never been a consensus on how best to conduct it; some journals assign just one external reviewer and then discuss the refereed paper at an internal review committee; others have three or more reviewers per ma