Peer Review – Essential for Article and Journal Scientific Assessment and Validity
Peer review is at the heart of the processes of not just medical journals but of all of science. It is the method by which grants are allocated, papers published, academics promoted, and Nobel prizes won (1). Each article, which is submitted for publication in a particular journal, according to the ethical and the established standards of practice, must pass through a peer-review process (2-7). The articles go through a peer-review process, without the authors’ names, and this is essentially a blind process. Common practice is to peer-review an article by two experts, prominent enough for scholarly careers in the field from which the article comes. Through years-long experience of the editor, of several journals, I think that a search for an appropriate peer-reviewer is the most complex part in the scope of responsibilities of the editor. Theoretically, everyone wants gladly to review particular article. The higher the impact factor of the journal is, this desire grows. In practice, every fourth petition for review of a certain work is accepted (8-12). Editors are faced with many dilemmas and primarily, through the numerous e-mails, they reach a certain reviewer, after a period, which sometimes last up to a year. Sometimes this review contains only two sentences, and the editor is forced to look for new potential reviewer as a decision on the work cannot be made, on the basis of two sentences. Each reviewer receives copy of the journal, for which he/she writes its opinion on the above-mentioned work.