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Record W2124388387 · doi:10.15537/1658-3175.3561

Ensuring the quality of peer-review process

2006· article· en· W2124388387 on OpenAlex
Mustafa Afifi

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueSaudi Medical Journal · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAcademic Writing and Publishing
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedicineProtocol (science)Ask pricePeer reviewQuality (philosophy)Psychological interventionMedical educationProcess (computing)Value (mathematics)Internet privacyAlternative medicineNursingComputer sciencePathology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I have recently noticed that the Saudi Medical Journal adopted “ask first” protocol to recruit referees. “Asking first” by query potential reviewers before sending manuscriptsis an alternative protocol to “just send” where reviewers are allowed to opt out. Actually, that motivated me to search for the studies, which have evaluated interventions that try to improve peer review. Smith1 stated that “the problem of peer review is that we have a good evidence on its deficiencies and poor evidence on its benefits”. Hereafter, I am spotting the light on some studies, and proposing some ideas to ensure the quality of the peer review process in the journal we all value highly. Pitkin and Burmeister2 concluded in their study that “ask first” led to a higher rate of referee turndown than did “just send” (15%, 8%, respectively). However, assenting “ask first” referees completed reviews faster, albeit the overall time for the review process did not differ between the two protocols. Hence, the authors concluded that they found no indication that soliciting in advance affected review quality.2 The effects of short training packages on quality of peer review was studied by Schroter et al.3 The one full day of face to face training package had only a slight impact on the quality of peer review in terms of quality of reviews and detection of deliberate major errors. However, the training did influence reviewers’ recommendations to editors. The authors recommended that the value of longer interventions need to be assisted.3 Others studied the feasibility of using a fictitious manuscript to evaluate peer reviewers performance. Smith1 mentioned that editors of the BMJ took a paper about to be published in the BMJ, inserted 8 deliberate errors, and sent the paper to 420 potential reviewers: 221 (53%) responded. The median number of errors spotted was 2, nobody spotted more than 5, and 16% did not spot any.1 In a similar study by Baxt et al4 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine (Ann Emerg Med) peer reviewers in this study failed to identify two thirds of the major errors in a fictitious manuscript. Therefore, they concluded that the use of a preconceived manuscript into which purposeful errors are placed might be a viable approach to evaluate reviewer performance.4 Errors in references in manuscripts submitted for publication are common. Browne et al5 showed that over half of all references included in manuscripts submitted to radiology journals contain at least one error.5 Therefore, another approach to study the reviewers’ performance is through testing the agreement between reviewers and editors in detecting errors in references in a sample of manuscripts accepted for publication. As in all quality talks, we could not neglect satisfaction. Weber et al6 studied the differences in satisfaction between authors whose manuscripts were accepted, reviewed and rejected by the Ann Emerg Med. Contributor satisfaction with peer review was modest. Authors of rejected manuscripts were dissatisfied with the time to decision and communication from the editor. Author satisfaction is associated with acceptance but not with review quality. Authors with more publication experience expressed less satisfaction with the peer review process.6 Also, the Saudi Medical Journal could analyze a representative sample of peer review material to compare the characteristics and the different types of comments amongst accepted and rejected manuscripts. Turcotte et al7 conducted a similar study for the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia (CJA). The authors concluded the most important aspects that influence acceptance or rejection of manuscripts submitted to CJA, namely the originality of the study, appropriate study design, and the relationship between experimental designs, results and conclusions.7 Improving authors’ as well as reviewers’ awareness of these aspects definitely ensure the quality of submitted articles and the quality of peer review process.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.796
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.070
GPT teacher head0.348
Teacher spread0.278 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it