Open AccessMedical Journal Peer Review: Process and Bias
Author(s) -
Laxmaiah Manchikanti,
Alan D. Kaye,
Mark V. Boswell,
Joshua A Hirsch
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
pain physician
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.31
H-Index - 99
eISSN - 2150-1149
pISSN - 1533-3159
DOI - 10.36076/ppj/2015.18.e1
Subject(s) - peer review , technical peer review , medicine , scientific misconduct , criticism , misconduct , competence (human resources) , scientific literature , scientific progress , health care , public relations , psychology , alternative medicine , political science , social psychology , law , epistemology , pathology , biology , paleontology , philosophy
Scientific peer review is pivotal in health care research in that it facilitates the evaluationof findings for competence, significance, and originality by qualified experts. While theorigins of peer review can be traced to the societies of the eighteenth century, it became aninstitutionalized part of the scholarly process in the latter half of the twentieth century. Thiswas a response to the growth of research and greater subject specialization. With the currentincrease in the number of specialty journals, the peer review process continues to evolve tomeet the needs of patients, clinicians, and policy makers.The peer review process itself faces challenges. Unblinded peer review might suffer frompositive or negative bias towards certain authors, specialties, and institutions. Peer review canalso suffer when editors and/or reviewers might be unable to understand the contents of thesubmitted manuscript. This can result in an inability to detect major flaws, or revelations ofmajor flaws after acceptance of publication by the editors. Other concerns include potentiallylong delays in publication and challenges uncovering plagiarism, duplication, corruption andscientific misconduct. Conversely, a multitude of these challenges have led to claims of scientificmisconduct and an erosion of faith. These challenges have invited criticism of the peer reviewprocess itself. However, despite its imperfections, the peer review process enjoys widespreadsupport in the scientific community.Peer review bias is one of the major focuses of today’s scientific assessment of the literature.Various types of peer review bias include content-based bias, confirmation bias, bias due toconservatism, bias against interdisciplinary research, publication bias, and the bias of conflictsof interest. Consequently, peer review would benefit from various changes and improvementswith appropriate training of reviewers to provide quality reviews to maintain the quality andintegrity of research without bias. Thus, an appropriate, transparent peer review is not onlyideal, but necessary for the future to facilitate scientific progress.Key words: Scientific research, peer review process, scientific publications, peer review bias,blinded peer review, scientific misconduct.