JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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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.
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Many journals provide peer reviewers with written instructions regarding review criteria, such as the originality of results, but little research has been done to investigate ways to improve or facilitate the peer review task. ⋯ The majority of respondents indicated that supplemental materials helped (or would have helped) them evaluate manuscripts and valued them more highly when they actually received them.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Effect on the quality of peer review of blinding reviewers and asking them to sign their reports: a randomized controlled trial.
Anxiety about bias, lack of accountability, and poor quality of peer review has led to questions about the imbalance in anonymity between reviewers and authors. ⋯ Neither blinding reviewers to the authors and origin of the paper nor requiring them to sign their reports had any effect on rate of detection of errors. Such measures are unlikely to improve the quality of peer review reports.