Blind Dates in Sciences

Every researcher remembers the moment when he or she sends in a manuscript or proposal for peer review. It is truly like going out on a blind date. Without knowing the identities of the peers, we often wait in the dark for an answer as to whether our best ideas will receive precious funding or years of hard labor will be recognized by a prestigious journal. Because our academic success and sometimes even viability depend on such an outcome, the wait can be excruciating. Unfortunately, as any seasoned member of the scientific community will warn you, the outcome of scientific peer reviews is dominated by rejection. Current funding levels at the National Institutes of Health imply that ≈90% of applications will be rejected and some top tier journals see even higher rejection rates among submitted manuscripts. Learning the odds-improving skills to navigate through various peer review processes has become a required course of scientific training and teaching curriculum for junior investigators.1 However, no matter how much you think you are prepared, the reality is, as long as we choose to pursue a scientific career, rejection from peer review will always be a constant in this occupation. Therefore, it is useful to discuss how to make the peer review experience constructive rather than destructive. In this article, we will focus our discussion on the peer review process for manuscripts, with particular insights provided by the editors of several leading scientific journals.With overwhelmingly negative verdicts and being blinded from much of the process, an author’s perception of peer review is expectedly dark and suspicious. Based on an online survey reported by Ho et al,2 less than half of authors think that biomedical journal review systems are fair and only a quarter of them think that the outcome is scientifically …