Charity and Peer Review in Publication

Who teaches the referee?

“…Unfortunately, referees still occasionally take the term critical review too literally, using ‘critical’ in its other sense of ‘censorious’ or ‘fault‐finding’. FJ Ingelfinger, the legendary editor of the New England Journal of Medicine , wrote an article, published on Christmas Day 1975, in which he urged referees to follow the lead of St. Paul and be charitable in their comments to the authors of papers 5 . Ingelfinger wanted all reviews to be signed because, in his nine years as editor, he had ‘never seen an abrasive or insulting word used by a reviewer who identified himself’.…”

“…FJ Ingelfinger, the legendary editor of the New England Journal of Medicine , wrote an article, published on Christmas Day 1975, in which he urged referees to follow the lead of St. Paul and be charitable in their comments to the authors of papers. 5 Ingelfinger wanted all reviews to be signed because, in his nine years as editor, he had 'never seen an abrasive or insulting word used by a reviewer who identified himself'. In contrast, another journal editor thought that reviews should be anonymous because anonymity improved freedom of expression.…”

Improving peer review with CARMA

“…There have been repeated calls to increase the transparency of the peer-review process by publishing the identity of reviewers. [10][11][12] The rationale for this so-called 'open peer review' process is that it could lead to more thorough and accurate reviews, because the reputation of reviewers would be on the line. A potential drawback to revealing the identity of reviewers arises from the fact that scholars sometimes need to evaluate each other's research in other circumstances, such as when reviewing grant proposals.…”

Making peer review evidence-based: It’s time to open the "black box"

“…Though somewhat polemical, these comments are lent credence by more formal studies, which indicate that peer review is a "closed and secretive process" (Tennant, 2018, p. 4), that is prone to being unreliable (Bornmann, Mutz, & Daniel, 2010;Cicchetti, 1991;Ingelfinger, 1974), and which may be biased towards positive findings (Emerson et al, 2010;Mahoney, 1977) and author-level characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, nationality, and institutional affiliation (Fox & Paine, 2019;Helmer et al, 2017;Link, 1998;Peters & Ceci, 1982). 6 Other commentators have pointed out that peer review is often ineffective at detecting or generally unable (or unwilling) to investigate cases of potential fraud (Relman, 1983;Rennie, 1989;Smith, 1997;Stroebe et al, 2012), that it does not ensure the credibility, reproducibility, and replicability of findings (Vazire, 2020), and that it is generally unaccountable for abuse and manipulation that can occur during the review process (Davis, 1979;Ingelfinger, 1975;Lloyd, 1985;O'Grady, 2020;Ross-Hellauer, 2017a;Smith, 2006;Tennant, 2018) among numerous other issues (Horton, 2000;Resnik, 2011;Resnik & Smith, 2020). Whatever the limitations of the studies and arguments described above, they indicate a paucity of research on peer review, the difficulty in studying it, and the reticence of scholarsand the systems which they compriseto self-reflect and evaluate their own functioning.…”