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Academic Merit, Promotion, and Journal Peer Reviewing: The Role of Academic Institutions In Providing Proper Recognition

The recent Sixth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication (September 2009) was packed with intense discussions about improving quality and credibility of biomedical publishing. Meeting every 4 years, the Congress has provided the opportunity for editors (past and present) to confer and debate on what constitutes quality publishing and how to achieve and maintain it. Not surprisingly, external peer review was one of the key topics: (1) What makes a good peer reviewer? (2) How does the quality of reviews submitted by reviewers differ over their careers? and (3) How can we train, encourage, and attract the best quality peer reviewers? Although the use of external peer reviewers is now seen as the fundamental approach for improving quality in science, it is easy to forget that many scientific journals did not use peer review until the 20th century. Unfortunately, peer review is an imperfect system, and a 2003 Cochrane Review found little empirical evidence to support editorial peer review as a means to improve biomedical publishing. Nonetheless, that Cochrane Review identified methodological problems in research on peer review and stated ‘‘that the absence of evidence on efficacy and effectiveness cannot be interpreted as evidence of their absence.’’ However, high-quality peer review does seem to have value in advancing biomedical publishing and our suggestion of the characteristics of that ideal peer reviewer (to provide this high-quality peer review) is shown in Table 1. In essence, the high-quality peer reviewer is a colleague who makes a major contribution to the quality of the scientific literature by having been involved in the peer-review process. The importance of this contribution cannot be understated and that gets to the core of assuring adequate recognition of these colleagues for their valuable contributions. Authors making contributions to the biomedical literature automatically have something substantive to show for their time and expertise (author names appear under the title of the article and are listed by the major indexing services, such as Medline [PubMed]). In contrast, peer reviewers, by and large, are anonymous with no tangible evidence of their contributions. This lack of tangible recognition impairs the ability of journal editors to entice reviewers. This is particularly problematic in the biomedical sciences where productivity measures are now increasingly tied to salary, rank, and tenure. Likely there are some internal motivations to be a peer reviewer including helping to advance their field, staying up to date, and educating oneself by learning what other reviewers reading the same paper thought of it (assuming editors share the reviews), which helps in getting people to agree to review, but it does not recognize the contributions to the biomedical literature. However, volunteering time to provide peer review that is not recognized as scholarly achievement and thus would reduce time devoted to other measurable productivity standards will generally be discouraged in academic environments. This makes it difficult for journal editors to obtain peer reviews of submitted materials. For example, for the Journal of Child Neurology, as the number of noneditorial submissions has increased from approximately 270 in 2005 to more than 370 in 2009, the ability to obtain more than 1 completed peer review per submission has decreased over that same time period from nearly 25% to less than 5%. This highlights a crisis that threatens to undermine the quality of biomedical publications and the urgency of finding a solution that will permit peer reviewing to be considered by the scientific community as a recognized valuable scholarly contribution. How can journals acknowledge high-quality peer reviewers in a way that will be tangible as scholarly achievement that the academic community will be willing to recognize? Some of the current mechanisms used to recognize the contributions of peer reviewers include publishing reviewer names periodically, providing continued medical education (CME) credits, offering discounts for journal subscriptions, or providing