THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
Peer review — the evaluation of work by people of comparable professional standing and competence — is widely regarded as the scientific seal of approval, denoting quality, validity, and importance. It is a crucial component to publishing and the progression of science. Over the last 20 years or so there has been a recognition of the limitations of peer review, and of the need for more research to ensure that the system is fit for purpose, and is optimised. Much of the focus has been on different peer review systems, ranging from double blind, in which the authors’ and reviewers’ names are unknown to one another, to open peer review, in which the identities of both are known to each other. The BJGP has been using open peer review for many years.
Fundamentally, peer review is concerned with four distinct aspects of quality:1 the assessment of the validity of the methodology, analysis, and conclusions; the originality, veracity, and significance of the findings; the suitability of the article for the journal to which it has been submitted; and the improvement of the quality of the writing and presentation. Peer review is one mechanism used by journal editors to guard against fraud and plagiarism, and other forms of publication misconduct. Editors, as well as many authors, recognise that high-quality, detailed, and constructive comments from peer reviewers have the potential to transform the quality of submitted manuscripts. Peer reviewers take on this important and time-consuming task with little, if anything, in the way of reward, but little attention has been paid to acknowledging, recognising, and rewarding them. This article acknowledges the importance of the work that peer reviewers do, with a particular focus on reviewers for the BJGP, and explores ways to better acknowledge and reward them.
FORMS OF PEER REVIEW AND THEIR RELATIVE MERITS
No method of peer …