Agreement between thoracic reviewers for the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery

Medical journals get several thousands of submissions per year and editors make every effort to select the best manuscripts for publication. Many of us have had the frustrating experience of seeing our manuscripts rejected by scientific journals. In such a situation, we usually blame the reviewers or the editors thinking that they misunderstood the relevance of our manuscript. In the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EJCTS), associate editors (AEs) play the hard role of gatekeepers [1], opening or closing the way for a final approval of manuscripts by the Editor-in-Chief. We, as AE, have to review hundreds of manuscripts a year and are exposed to making mistakes in both ways: either accepting not-so-good papers or rejecting manuscripts that are finally approved and highly cited in other journals. Agreement between reviewers facilitates very much the editorial process. Indeed, if two reviewers have found major problems and both recommend a paper to be excluded from publication we should admit that some wrong aspects of the manuscript have to be modified before a sound text can be printed. The problem arises when major discrepancies are evidenced by the reviewers’ comments. In such instances, an arbitrator can be invited or, alternatively, the AE makes a thorough assessment of the manuscript, if