Peer review

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For Wikipedia's Peer Review area, see Wikipedia:Peer review. For other uses, see Peer review (disambiguation).
"Independent review" redirects here. It is not to be confused with The Independent Review.
A reviewer at the American National Institutes of Health evaluates a grant proposal.

Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers). It constitutes a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards of quality, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs, e.g., medical peer review.

Professional[edit]

Professional peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. In academia, peer review is common in decisions related to faculty advancement and tenure.[citation needed]

A prototype professional peer-review process was recommended in the Ethics of the Physician written by Ishāq ibn ʻAlī al-Ruhāwī (854–931). He stated that a visiting physician had to make duplicate notes of a patient's condition on every visit. When the patient was cured or had died, the notes of the physician were examined by a local medical council of other physicians, who would decide whether the treatment had met the required standards of medical care.[1]

Professional peer review is common in the field of health care, where it is usually called clinical peer review.[2] Further, since peer review activity is commonly segmented by clinical discipline, there is also physician peer review, nursing peer review, dentistry peer review, etc.[3] Many other professional fields have some level of peer review process: accounting,[4][5] law,[6][7] engineering (e.g., software peer review, technical peer review), aviation, and even forest fire management.[8]

Peer review is used in education to achieve certain learning objectives, particularly as a tool to reach higher order processes in the affective and cognitive domains as defined by Bloom's taxonomy. This may take a variety of forms, including closely mimicking the scholarly peer review processes used in science and medicine.[9][10]

Scholarly[edit]

Main article: Scholarly peer review

Scholarly peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal or as a book. The peer review helps the publisher (that is, the editor-in-chief or the editorial board) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is generally considered necessary to academic quality and is used in most major scientific journals, but does by no means prevent publication of all invalid research. Traditionally, peer reviewers have been anonymous, but there is currently a significant amount of open peer review, where the comments are visible to readers, generally with the identities of the peer reviewers disclosed as well.

Government policy[edit]

Further information: U.S. Government peer review policies

The European Union has been using peer review in the 'Open Method of Co-ordination' of policies in the fields of active labour market policy since 1999.[11] In 2004, a program of peer reviews started in social inclusion.[12] Each program sponsors about eight peer review meetings in each year, in which a 'host country' lays a given policy or initiative open to examination by half a dozen other countries and the relevant European-level NGOs. These usually meet over two days and include visits to local sites where the policy can be seen in operation. The meeting is preceded by the compilation of an expert report on which participating 'peer countries' submit comments. The results are published on the web.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, through UNECE Environmental Performance Reviews, uses the technique of peer review to evaluate progress made by its member countries in improving their environmental policies.[citation needed]

The State of California is the only U.S. state to mandate scientific peer review. In 1997, the California Governor signed into law Senate Bill 1320 (Sher), Chapter 295, statutes of 1997, which mandates that, before any CalEPA Board, Department, or Office adopts a final version of a rule-making, the scientific findings, conclusions, and assumptions on which the proposed rule are based must be submitted for independent external scientific peer review. This requirement is incorporated into the California Health and Safety Code Section 57004.[citation needed]

Medical[edit]

For more details on this topic, see Medical peer review.

Medical peer review may refer to clinical peer review, or the peer evaluation of clinical teaching skills for both physicians and nurses,[13][14] or scientific peer review of journal articles, or to a secondary round of peer review for the clinical value of articles concurrently published in medical journals.[15] "Medical peer review" has been used by the American Medical Association to refer not only to the process of improving quality and safety in health care organizations, but also to the process of rating clinical behavior or compliance with professional society membership standards.[16][17] Thus, the terminology has poor standardization and specificity, particularly as a database search term.[citation needed]

Process, costs and criticisms[edit]

It has been argued that peer review is impossible to define in operational terms, someone performing the exact same research could just as easily be a financial competitor as a collaborator, creating potential for conflict of interest. Definitions of what constitute the review process may vary across journals and disciplines. A study by the BMJ inserted deliberate errors into publication which successfully avoided fact checking.

Journals may take over a year to publish. Most reviewers are not paid, with the cost of review for the BMJ estimated at £100 per paper. On average the academic community pays roughly $5000 for access to a peer reviewed paper.

There is strong evidence of bias against women in the process of awarding grants. [18] The editorial peer review process has also been strongly biased against `negative studies', those findings where in intervention does not work. [19]

One randomized trial found blinding reviewers to the identity of authors improved the quality of reviews), [20] although this presented a means of experimentally assessing peer review, two later studies found contrary findings that blinding reviewers improved the quality of reviews. These studies also showed that such blinding is difficult to achieve, and that reviewers could identify the authors in about a quarter to a third of cases. [21] [22]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Spier, Ray (2002). "The history of the peer-review process". Trends in Biotechnology. 20 (8): 357–8. doi:10.1016/S0167-7799(02)01985-6. PMID 12127284. 
  2. ^ Dans, PE (1993). "Clinical peer review: burnishing a tarnished image" (PDF). Ann. Intern. Med. 118 (7): 566–8. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-118-7-199304010-00014. PMID 8442628. 
  3. ^ Milgrom P, Weinstein P, Ratener P, Read WA, Morrison K; Weinstein; Ratener; Read; Morrison (1978). "Dental Examinations for Quality Control: Peer Review versus Self-Assessment". Am. J. Public Health. 68 (4): 394–401. doi:10.2105/AJPH.68.4.394. PMC 1653950Freely accessible. PMID 645987. 
  4. ^ "AICPA Peer Review Manual". American Institute of CPAs. Retrieved October 4, 2010. 
  5. ^ 2012 Peer Review Program Manual
  6. ^ "Peer Review". UK Legal Services Commission. Retrieved October 4, 2010. 
  7. ^ "Peer Review Ratings". Martindale. Retrieved October 4, 2010. 
  8. ^ "Peer Review Panels – Purpose and Process" (PDF). USDA Forest Service. February 6, 2006. Retrieved October 4, 2010. 
  9. ^ Sims Gerald K. (1989). "Student Peer Review in the Classroom: A Teaching and Grading Tool" (PDF). Journal of Agronomic Education. 18: 105–108. The review process was double-blind to provide anonymity for both authors and reviewers, but was otherwise handled in a fashion similar to that used by scientific journals 
  10. ^ Liu, Jianguo; Pysarchik, Dawn Thorndike; Taylor, William W. (2002). "Peer Review in the Classroom" (PDF). BioScience. 52 (9): 824–829. doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2002)052[0824:PRITC]2.0.CO;2. 
  11. ^ Mutual Learning Programme – Peer Reviews
  12. ^ Peer Review and Assessment in Social Inclusion—Evaluations par les pairs
  13. ^ Medschool.ucsf.edu
  14. ^ Ludwick R, Dieckman BC, Herdtner S, Dugan M, Roche M; Dieckman; Herdtner; Dugan; Roche (November–December 1998). "Documenting the scholarship of clinical teaching through peer review". Nurse Educ. 23 (6): 17–20. doi:10.1097/00006223-199811000-00008. PMID 9934106. 
  15. ^ Haynes RB, Cotoi C, Holland J, et al. (2006). "Second-order peer review of the medical literature for clinical practitioners". JAMA. 295 (15): 1801–8. doi:10.1001/jama.295.15.1801. PMID 16622142. 
  16. ^ (page 131)
  17. ^ Ama-assn.org Archived March 6, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
  18. ^ Wenneras C, Wold A (May 22, 1997). "Nepotism and sexism in peer-review". Nature. 387(6631): 341–3. 
  19. ^ Richard Smith (April 2006). "Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals". Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 199: 178–182. doi:10.1258/jrsm.99.4.178. 
  20. ^ McNutt RA, Evans AT, Fletcher RH, Fletcher SW (Mar 9, 1990). "The effects of blinding on the quality of peer review. A randomized trial.". JAMA. 263 (10): 1371–6. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.11014. 
  21. ^ Justice AC, Cho MK, Winker MA, Berlin JA, Rennie D (1998). "The PEER investigators. Does masking author identity improve peer review quality: a randomised controlled trial.". JAMA. 280: 240–2. 
  22. ^ van Rooyen S, Godlee F, Evans S, Smith R, Black N (1998). "Effect of blinding and unmasking on the quality of peer review: a randomised trial.". JAMA. 280: 234–7. 
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