Agreement among reviewers.

To the Editor: The purposes of Physical Therapy, as stated on the masthead of each issue, are to represent “the science and practice of the profession,” document “the state of the art of physical therapy,” and serve as the “archives of our professional knowledge.” Like most technical journals, Physical Therapy uses a process of peer review to help achieve these ends. In a discussion of the process, Ingelfinger commented that, “In what might be imagined as some sort of editorial heaven, the process of review would work perfectly. Two experts given the same manuscript would come up with identical evaluations.”1 Needless to say, comparisons of different experts' recommendations for the disposition of submitted manuscripts have revealed the experts' evaluations to be far from identical. A report cited by Zuckerman and Merton indicated that different referees agreed as to a paper's being acceptable or unacceptable in 75% of the cases.2…