Peer Review Status Research Articles

Toward quality peer review: Outcomes of peer review across provincial radiation oncology programs.

205 Background: Review of treatment plans by a second radiation oncologist is an important quality indicator in radiation oncology. Peer review (PR) can improve quality of care in individual patients by detecting clinical and planning issues and recommending plan changes. This study reports the frequency and nature of these changes across all 14 radiation oncology programs (ROPs) in Ontario, Canada. Methods: We identified all peer-reviewed curative treatment plans delivered in Ontario within a 3-month study period between Dec 2013-Nov 2014 using Cancer Care Ontario’s Activity Level Reporting System, where data on treatment intent and date, disease site treated, PR status, timing of PR, and nature of recommended changes were available. Results: There was considerable variation in the proportion of plans peer-reviewed across ROPs (70.2%, range: 40.8-99.2%). Over the study period, 5,561 curative treatment plans were peer-reviewed and 3.3% had changes recommended. Of those, 21.0% had major clinical and re-planning implications. Recommended changes most often involved minor (63.1%) vs major (36.9%) re-planning implications. Highest proportions of changes were recommended for the treatment of the esophagus, uterus, upper limb, cervix, lower limb, H&N, bilateral lung, right supraclavicular nodes, rectum, and spine (5.0%-7.0%). Plans involving the left breast had slightly more changes recommended (3.0% [95%CI:2.0%-4.5%]) vs right breast (2.4% [95%CI:1.5%-3.8%]). Recommendations were more frequently made when PR was conducted pre-radiotherapy (3.8%) vs during (1.4%-2.8%; p = 0.005), however the nature and implementation of changes were not statistically associated with the timing of PR (p = 0.91; p = 0.23, respectively). Proportion of recommended changes to treatment plans was not statistically associated with ROP patient volume (p = 0.08), proportion of plans peer-reviewed (p = 0.36) or academic status (p = 0.75). Conclusions: Significant variation exists in the proportion of recommended changes across all disease sites and ROPs. PR seems effective in detecting treatment plans with important clinical and planning issues; strategies should be developed to optimize its conduct in radiation oncology.

Graduate Students Reference Open Access Content in Literature Review Assignments

A Review of:
 Allen, E. J., & Weber, R. A. (2014). The library and the web: Graduate students’ selection of open access journals for empirical literature searches. Journal of Web Librarianship, 8(3), 243-262. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19322909.2014.927745 
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – This study seeks to understand to what degree education graduate students cite open access, peer-reviewed journals in their coursework and whether patterns of open access referencing change over time.
 
 Design – Longitudinal reference list analysis.
 
 Setting – Public university in the United States of America.
 
 Subjects – Reference lists collected from final literature review papers in a graduate-level education class (n = 382).
 
 Methods – The authors collected reference lists from final literature review papers in a graduate-level education class for a nine-year time frame from the 2005 to 2013 academic years. The authors analyzed 2,594 reference entries from the 382 reference lists in the sample.
 
 The authors organized reference entries into spreadsheets for analysis, creating one spreadsheet per class section and sorting references by type (e.g., book, journal article, website, etc.) and source. The authors also created a cumulative list of journal titles that they analyzed for open access status and how often the journals appeared in the sample. Other information collected about each journal included "ISSNs, national origin, journal sponsorship, frequency and years of student usage, presence of empirical research, [and] peer review status" (p. 249). Finally, the authors organized open access journals into the following four categories based on their access method:
 
 • Category A "OA Platform and Publisher"
 • Category B "Publisher Only"
 • Category C "Delay or Hybrid from Host or Publisher"
 • Category D "Subscription Based, but Self Archived" (p. 249)
 
 Main Results – A total of 594 unique journals appeared in reference lists over the study period, and 11.5% (n=68) of the total were open access journals. Of the open access journals, 96% (n=65) included original research articles, and the majority (n=51) fell into Category A "OA Platform and Publisher." Nine, six, and two journal titles fell into categories B, C, and D, respectively. The authors found no pattern or change in the use of open access titles during the nine-year study period. Open access journals appeared in reference lists an average of 14 times per year with the highest usage observed in 2009.
 
 Conclusion – The results show that graduate students in the sample used a range of open access journals. The presence of open access resources in reference lists signals that students may use both library subscription databases and open web search tools to complete their literature review assignments. The authors suggest potential reasons why open access use did not grow during the study period, including a possible mismatch between student research interests and the topics present in open access titles, the lack of discussion about open access publishing during library instruction, or student satisfaction with the resources provided through library-sponsored subscriptions. Librarians are encouraged to include high-quality open access resources within their catalogues or other electronic resources to increase open access discoverability and to include popular open web search tools as a means to retrieve open access materials during information literacy instruction.

Social Media and the Politics of Small Data: Post Publication Peer Review and Academic Value

Academics across the sciences and humanities are increasingly being encouraged to use social media as a post-publication strategy to enhance and extend the impact of their articles and books. As well as various measures of social media impact, the turn towards publication outlets which are open access and free to use is contributing to anxieties over where, what and how to publish. This is all the more pernicious given the increasing measures of academic value that govern the academy, and the stresses, strains and hidden injuries that structure academic life. This article will debate these issues and their consequences for the humanities and social sciences by analysing the contours of a recent controversy in academic science publishing, which follows the after-lives of a highly cited journal article. This includes a discussion of the value and status of post-publication peer review, and the politics of open access publishing, of citation and the public communication of science within digital environments and archives.

Moving manuscripts efficiently through the system

Interpretation uses an online manuscript system for submission, peer review, and production. Authors can track peer review status of their submissions at every stage. Editorial actions taken by authors, staff, editors, and reviewers trigger status changes. Examples of editorial actions include

Advancing Kinesiology Through Improved Peer Review

Peer review of scholarship is essential to journal quality, evidence, knowledge advancement, and application of that knowledge in any field. This commentary summarizes recent literature on issues related to peer-review quality and current review practice in kinesiology and provides recommendations to improve peer review in kinesiology journals. We reviewed the literature on the characteristics of peer review in scientific journals and describe the status of peer review in kinesiology journals. Although the majority of scholars and editors strongly support the peer-review process, systematic research in several disciplines has shown somewhat positive but mixed results for the efficacy of peer review in evaluating the quality of and improving research reports. Past recommendations for improvement have focused on agreement between reviewers, standards for evaluating quality, and clarification of the editorial team roles. Research on interventions, however, indicates that improving reviewer performance is difficult. The specific research on peer review in kinesiology is limited. Six recommendations to improve peer review are proposed: publishing clear evaluation standards, establishing collaborative evaluation procedures and editorial team roles, utilizing online submission data to help improve reviewer comments, creating author appeals procedures, protecting reviewer time commitments, and improving reviewer recognition. There is considerable variation in peer-review criteria and procedures in kinesiology, and implementing several reasonable improvements may advance knowledge development and the field of kinesiology.

Student-Selected Journals: An Emerging Resource

This longitudinal study investigates the journal selections of 367 graduate students as they worked to fulfill a commonly assigned, criteria-based literature search on educational topics. The criteria called for evidence-based studies, published within the current ten years of course enrollment, within peer-reviewed journals. Student references were evaluated, but investigation revealed that students succeeded only partially in meeting the criteria. Two hundred ninety-nine journal titles used most commonly have resulted in a list that identified peer review status and research content characteristics for each title. The findings suggest new opportunities to improve library resources, instruction, and student achievement.

A critical evaluation of the volume, relevance and quality of evidence submitted by the tobacco industry to oppose standardised packaging of tobacco products

ObjectivesTo examine the volume, relevance and quality of transnational tobacco corporations’ (TTCs) evidence that standardised packaging of tobacco products ‘won't work’, following the UK government's decision to ‘wait and see’...

Experienced journal reviewers' perceptions of and engagement with the task of reviewing: an Australian perspective

As part of a mixed-methods doctoral project, this study drew on an interview, bracketed by two surveys, with experienced Australian reviewers. It explored questions about the contributions of peer review, the need and possibility to improve it and the driving factors for reviewers to contribute voluntarily. The respondents emphasised the essential status of peer review, especially for ensuring quality in research and publication. They also acknowledged its contributions of gatekeeping, establishing credibility and authority, building capacity, improving quality and facilitating disciplinary dialogue. They indicated there had been no significant change to peer review, and nearly half of them indicated no change was needed. A strong sense of faith and a high level of tolerance of the deficiencies in peer review were evident, which appeared to be related to the awareness that for most problems there was no obvious solution and to an appreciation of the voluntary nature of the task. This faith and tolerance, along with the complex nature of peer review, partially explained why it was so difficult to make any change to it. There is one area where the respondents were keen to see improvement – they called for their contribution as reviewers to be recognised in a more explicit manner, especially by employing institutions. The study calls into question how long a voluntary system can endure.

OP03 Assessing the Evidence Base of Tobacco Industry Submissions to Public Consultations: The case of ‘plain Packaging’ of Tobacco Products in the UK

BackgroundThe UK’s public consultation on ‘plain packaging’ of tobacco products generated an unprecedented volume of responses. Given the track record of the tobacco industry’s misuse of science to oppose policy...

A Review and Critical Analysis of Professional Societies’ Guidelines for Pharmacologic Management of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

The development of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), which are promulgated by various sponsoring organizations to provide direction to clinicians for management of complex problems, generally adhere to a set of key principles. To reassure the users of their scientific and ethical validity, these include the use of a system to rate the quality of evidence on which the guideline is based and the divulgence of any conflicts of interest (COI) among members of the panel developing the guidelines. I analyzed the CPGs for pharmacologic management of patients with type 2 diabetes written by the two US professional societies that developed such guidelines (American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists [AACE] and the American Diabetes Association/European Association for the Study of Diabetes [ADA/EASD]) to assess their adherence to these principles of guideline development and to compare them with regard to simplicity, consideration of costs, and peer review status. To put the existence of COIs in these guidelines into context, I also reviewed the COIs from government-sponsored panels that developed diabetes CPGs. The results of this analysis suggest that both the AACE and ADA/EASD guidelines should be regarded as consensus documents rather than true CPGs, since neither guideline employed evidence grading. COI was extremely common among the members of both CPG panels from professional organizations, as well in the CPG panels with government sponsorship. In addition, the nature and extent of external peer review of these guidelines is unclear. Given these limitations, the AACE and ADA/EASD CPGs for diabetes management should be regarded as advisory at best, rather than prescriptive or authoritative, especially in view of their noncompliance with key principles of guideline development.

CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology

CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology, is an ontology for describing the nature of reference citations in scientific research articles and other scholarly works, both to other such publications and also to Web information resources, and for publishing these descriptions on the Semantic Web. Citation are described in terms of the factual and rhetorical relationships between citing publication and cited publication, the in-text and global citation frequencies of each cited work, and the nature of the cited work itself, including its publication and peer review status. This paper describes CiTO and illustrates its usefulness both for the annotation of bibliographic reference lists and for the visualization of citation networks. The latest version of CiTO, which this paper describes, is CiTO Version 1.6, published on 19 March 2010. CiTO is written in the Web Ontology Language OWL, uses the namespace http://purl.org/net/cito/, and is available from http://purl.org/net/cito/. This site uses content negotiation to deliver to the user an OWLDoc Web version of the ontology if accessed via a Web browser, or the OWL ontology itself if accessed from an ontology management tool such as Protégé 4 (http://protege.stanford.edu/). Collaborative work is currently under way to harmonize CiTO with other ontologies describing bibliographies and the rhetorical structure of scientific discourse.

Using computer based assessments in a large statistics service course

Date deposited: 20 December 2012 Version of file: Published Peer Review Status: Peer reviewed Citation for item: Fawcett L, Foster WH, Youd AJ. Using computer based assessments in a large statistics service course. MSOR Connections 2008, 8(3), 43-46. Further information on publisher website: http://mathstore.gla.ac.uk/ Publisher’s copyright statement: © Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre for Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research The definitive version of this article is published by Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre for Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research, 2008 and is available at: http://www.mas.ncl.ac.uk/~nlf8/Publications/CBApaper.pdf Always use the definitive version when citing. Use Policy: The full-text may be used and/or reproduced and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not for profit purposes provided that:  A full bibliographic reference is made to the original source  A link is made to the metadata record in Newcastle E-prints  The full text is not changed in any way. The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.

The Status of Peer Review

The Status of Peer Review

Atypical Antipsychotics and Glucose Homeostasis

Persistent reports have linked atypical antipsychotics with diabetes, yet causative mechanisms responsible for this linkage are unclear. Goals of this review are to outline the pathogenesis of nonimmune diabetes and to survey the available literature related to why antipsychotics may lead to this disease. We accessed the literature regarding atypical antipsychotics and glucose homeostasis using PubMed. The search included English-language publications from 1990 through October 2004. Keywords used included atypical antipsychotics plus one of the following: glucose, insulin, glucose tolerance, obesity, or diabetes. In addition, we culled information from published abstracts from several national and international scientific meetings for the years 2001 through 2004, including the American Diabetes Association, the International Congress on Schizophrenia Research, and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. The latter search was necessary because of the paucity of well-controlled prospective studies. We examined publications with significant new data or publications that contributed to the overall comprehension of the impact of atypical antipsychotics on glucose metabolism. We favored original peer-reviewed articles and were less likely to cite single case studies and/or anecdotal information. Approximately 75% of the fewer than 150 identified articles were examined and included in this review. Validity of data was evaluated using the existence of peer-review status as well as our own experience with methodology described in the specific articles. The metabolic profile caused by atypical antipsychotic treatment resembles type 2 diabetes. These agents cause weight gain in treated subjects and may induce obesity in both visceral and subcutaneous depots, as occurs in diabetes. Insulin resistance, usually associated with obesity, occurs to varying degrees with different antipsychotics, although more comparative studies with direct assessment of resistance are needed. A major problem in assessing drug effects is that psychiatric disease itself can cause many of the manifestations leading to diabetes, including weight gain and sedentary lifestyle. While studies in healthy subjects are limited and inconclusive, studies in animal models are more revealing. In the conscious canine model, some atypical antipsychotics cause adiposity, including visceral obesity, a strong risk factor for the metabolic syndrome. Furthermore, while few studies have examined effects of antipsychotics on pancreatic beta-cell function, canine studies demonstrate that expected beta-cell compensation for insulin resistance may be reduced or even eliminated with these agents. Atypical antipsychotics have been shown to contribute to weight gain, which may well reflect increased body fat deposition. Such increased fat is known to cause resistance to insulin action, although more information regarding effect on insulin action is needed. The effect of these drugs on fat distribution has been clearly shown in animal models. It is known that the normal response to insulin resistance is compensatory hyperinsulinemia, which may prevent diabetes. In animals, there is evidence that the hyperinsulinemic compensation is inadequate in the face of atypical antipsychotic agents. It remains to be examined whether failure of adequate pancreatic beta-cell compensation for insulin resistance plays a central role in the pathogenesis of diabetes associated with this class of drugs.

Association of journal quality indicators with methodological quality of clinical research articles.

The ability to identify scientific journals that publish high-quality research would help clinicians, scientists, and health-policy analysts to select the most up-to-date medical literature to review. To assess whether journal characteristics of (1) peer-review status, (2) citation rate, (3) impact factor, (4) circulation, (5) manuscript acceptance rate, (6) MEDLINE indexing, and (7) Brandon/Hill Library List indexing are predictors of methodological quality of research articles, we conducted a cross-sectional study of 243 original research articles involving human subjects published in general internal medical journals. The mean (SD) quality score of the 243 articles was 1.37 (0.22). All journals reported a peer-review process and were indexed on MEDLINE. In models that controlled for article type (randomized controlled trial [RCT] or non-RCT), journal citation rate was the most statistically significant predictor (0.051 increase per doubling; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.037-0.065; P<.001). In separate analyses by article type, acceptance rate was the strongest predictor for RCT quality (-0.113 per doubling; 95% CI, -0.148 to -0.078; P<.001), while journal citation rate was the most predictive factor for non-RCT quality (0.051 per doubling; 95% CI, 0.044-0.059; P<.001). High citation rates, impact factors, and circulation rates, and low manuscript acceptance rates and indexing on Brandon/Hill Library List appear to be predictive of higher methodological quality scores for journal articles.

The effects of peer review and evidence quality on judge evaluations of psychological science: are judges effective gatekeepers?

Scientifically trained and untrained judges read descriptions of an expert's research in which the peer review status and internal validity were manipulated. Seventeen percent of the judges said they would admit the expert evidence, irrespective of its internal validity. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal also had no effect on judges' decisions. Training interacted with the internal validity manipulation. Scientifically trained judges rated valid evidence more positively than did untrained judges. Untrained judges rated a study with a confound more positively than did trained judges. Training did not affect judge evaluations of studies with a missing control group or potential experimenter bias. Admissibility decisions were correlated with judges' perceptions of the study's validity, jurors' ability to evaluate scientific evidence, and the effectiveness of cross-examination and opposing experts to highlight flaws in scientific methodology.

Why review articles on the health effects of passive smoking reach different conclusions.

To determine whether the conclusions of review articles on the health effects of passive smoking are associated with article quality, the affiliations of their authors, or other article characteristics. Review articles published from 1980 to 1995 were identified through electronic searches of MEDLINE and EMBASE and from a database of symposium proceedings on passive smoking. An article was included if its stated or implied purpose was to review the scientific evidence that passive smoking is associated with 1 or more health outcomes. Articles were excluded if they did not focus specifically on the health effects of passive smoking or if they were not written in English. Review article quality was evaluated by 2 independent assessors who were trained, followed a written protocol, had no disclosed conflicts of interest, and were blinded to all study hypotheses and identifying characteristics of articles. Article conclusions were categorized by the 2 assessors and by one of the authors. Author affiliation was classified as either tobacco industry affiliated or not, based on whether the authors were known to have received funding from or participated in activities sponsored by the tobacco industry. Other article characteristics were classified by one of the authors using predefined criteria. A total of 106 reviews were identified. Overall, 37% (39/106) of reviews concluded that passive smoking is not harmful to health; 74% (29/39) of these were written by authors with tobacco industry affiliations. In multiple logistic regression analyses controlling for article quality, peer review status, article topic, and year of publication, the only factor associated with concluding that passive smoking is not harmful was whether an author was affiliated with the tobacco industry (odds ratio, 88.4; 95% confidence interval, 16.4-476.5; P<.001). The conclusions of review articles are strongly associated with the affiliations of their authors. Authors of review articles should disclose potential financial conflicts of interest, and readers of review articles should consider authors' affiliations when deciding how to judge an article's conclusions.

Peer review of psychotherapeutic treatments in psychiatry: a review of the literature.

This paper reviews the literature concerning the current status of peer review of psychotherapeutic treatments in psychiatry. Accounts of the aims and mechanisms of peer review, administrative issues and the effects of peer review on patient care and professional practice are examined.

Tobacco industry response to a risk assessment of environmental tobacco smoke

Tobacco industry response to a risk assessment of environmental tobacco smoke

Peer review and you.

A summary of the present status of peer review is presented with its implications dependent upon the awaited decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. The history of the Astoria Clinic and Dr. Patrick is detailed. Salient features of antitrust law are pointed out. Suggestions for a physician to follow if appointed to a peer review committee are detailed. The necessity for such review is summarized.