JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Does masking author identity improve peer review quality? A randomized controlled trial. PEER Investigators.
All authors may not be equal in the eyes of reviewers. Specifically, well-known authors may receive less objective (poorer quality) reviews. One study at a single journal found a small improvement in review quality when reviewers were masked to author identity. ⋯ Masking reviewers to author identity as commonly practiced does not improve quality of reviews. Since manuscripts of well-known authors are more difficult to mask, and those manuscripts may be more likely to benefit from masking, the inability to mask reviewers to the identity of well-known authors may have contributed to the lack of effect.
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Studies with positive results are more likely to be published in biomedical journals than are studies with negative results. However, many studies submitted for consideration at scientific meetings are never published in full; bias in this setting is poorly studied. ⋯ Positive-outcome bias was evident when studies were submitted for consideration and was amplified in the selection of abstracts for both presentation and publication, neither of which was strongly related to study design or quality.
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Quality of reviewers is crucial to journal quality, but there are usually too many for editors to know them all personally. A reliable method of rating them (for education and monitoring) is needed. ⋯ Subjective editor ratings of individual reviewers were moderately reliable and correlated with reviewer ability to report manuscript flaws. Individual reviewer rate of recommendation for acceptance and decision congruence might be thought to be markers of a discriminating (ie, high-quality) reviewer, but these variables were poorly correlated with editors' ratings of review quality or the reviewer's ability to detect flaws in a fictitious manuscript. Therefore, they cannot be substituted for actual quality ratings by editors.
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Comparative Study
A comparison of the opinions of experts and readers as to what topics a general medical journal (JAMA) should address.
Journal editors are responsible to many publics, and their choices of articles to publish are a frequent source of dispute. ⋯ Expert opinion and the opinion of readers as to what JAMA should emphasize vary widely.
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Scientific journals issue press releases to disseminate scientific news about articles they publish. ⋯ Journal articles described in press releases, in particular those described first or second in the press release, are associated with the subsequent publication of newspaper stories on the same topic.