Peer Review: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Abstract

As another year of JGIM print draws to a close, we want to take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge the many talented people who have served as peer reviewers for JGIM over the past 12 months. Peer review is an imperfect process, one that it has become fashionable to revile for its lack of consistency. The latest salvo came from a paper in the journal of Surgical Endoscopy that posed the question “Is expert peer review obsolete?” (Herron DM. Surg Endosc. 2012;26(8):2275–80. Epub 2012, Feb 21. Is expert peer review obsolete? A model suggests that post-publication reader review may exceed the accuracy of traditional peer review). In this article, the author created a mathematical model of the peer review process to compare traditional ‘expert reviewer’ review with assessment by ‘reader-reviewers’ consisting of the general readership of the journal. They found that when 400,000 hypothetical manuscripts were modeled, the accuracy of the reader-reviewer group was inferior to the expert reviewer group in the 10-reviewer and 20-reviewer trial, but that when 50 or 100 reader reviewers were used the reader-reviewer group surpassed the expert reviewer group in accuracy. While this is an intriguing finding, gathering 50 or 100 reader-reviewers per paper is obviously no small task for a journal like JGIM that receives well more than 1,000 submissions per year. So while the idea of open-sourced reviews appeals to our sense of transparency and fairness, for now it seems that we will continue to rely on our large panel of expert volunteers to help ensure the quality and fidelity of what we publish.