Peer Review in Scholarly Biomedical Journals: a Few Things that Make a Big Difference

Peer review is currently a cornerstone of scholarly publishing in biomedicine. Most journal editors rely heavily on the support of internal and external reviewers to help them evaluate the scientific merit of submissions. In the absence of a solid evidence base justifying the use of peer review or universally accepted guidelines, each scholarly journal adopts its own rules for processing and editing manuscripts. These rules stem from the re search and writing environment surrounding the authors, reviewers and editors. It is therefore not surprising that there are marked differences in how journal submissions are processed and accepted for publication within and between the mainstream science countries and the developing world. The differences relate to who the reviewers are, how many are involved in the review, how long it takes to review and what type of incentives are used. The language in which the science is written and the size of the scientific community are addition al sources of diversity. Furthermore, numerous limitations of peer review and resultant scientific corruption have been reported by editors of small journals around the world (1-3).