Our editorial process--some experiences and reflections.

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about how scientific journals can contribute to the quality assurance of what is published. Even if the ultimate responsibility has to lie with the research community, editors have to realize that the editorial process is influential. Important for discussions on the quality of scientific publishing are organizations such as the World Association of Medical Editors, the European Association of Science Editors and Congresses on Peer Review in Biomedical Publication. In fact, these questions have developed into a research field of their own. The 2002 June issue of JAMA (1) was devoted to papers originally presented at the IVth Peer Review Congress in Barcelona in September 2001. The papers cover a broad range of issues related to medical publishing such as authorship and contribution, the peer review system as such, quality issues and standards, publication bias and communication to readers. Whether peer review has an impact on quality still seems to be challenged, even if there are some indications of effects of using statistical checklists, training of reviewers and editorial technical editing (2, 3). Drummond Rennie points out in his Editorial for JAMA (4) that it could be that ‘‘we are using the wrong tools to study the wrong factors’’. If peer review is not only a matter of screening for ‘‘bad quality’’ but also ‘‘represents a crucial democratization of the editorial process by incorporating and educating large number of the scientific community’’, this cannot easily be captured by a quantitative tool box. Rennie acknowledges Richard Horton for his more qualitative approach when studying for example how well different contributors’ views are represented in published papers. He also argues for an inclusion of specialty journals in the scientific evaluations, not only focusing on the ‘‘big five’’ as is often done today (5). We feel that we can contribute to this debate by describing to our readers and potential authors the processing of manuscripts in our journal. The need for a detailed description can be compared to the need for specifying exactly the components of a certain public health intervention (exposure) to be able to evaluate its effect. Only by revealing what is actually done can we compare with other similar efforts. Transparency about the editorial process also allows for our readers and contributors to judge the fairness of our handling of manuscripts. Borrowing some central concepts from evaluating qualitative research we claim that transparency and reflexivity are important criteria for assessing the quality/trustworthiness of a scientific journal’s editorial process (6). We will thus describe the setting and structure of the journal including the overall vision and goals that have been set. A flow chart of the editorial process briefly describes some of the important steps. Finally we empirically illustrate the development of our editorial process over the years by using our database for selfevaluation and discuss possible implications for the future.