Peer Review in Health Sciences

of the paper, and asking them to accept the invitation to review before making the whole paper available. Our experience with this at the BMJ Publishing Group is that it takes longer than before until a paper is being reviewed. But this is compensated for by the fact that, once they’ve agreed to review a paper, reviewers tend to do it faster than under the old systems. Monitoring the progress of papers One of the hardest jobs is keeping people to deadlines; a series of reminders can help. When there are a lot of papers you need your computer’s help to monitor progress – so you need alerts or reports on reviewers’ reports that are overdue, a system for automatically sending reminders, and a system that prompts you to find another reviewer if your reminders produce no response. You also need the ability to vary these prompts in case you want to handle fast track papers (though you might handle these outside your routine system). Reviewers also welcome feedback, so a note of the final decision and an explanation, if the decision is different from the reviewer’s recommendation, should be sent to the reviewer. Once the paper is back you need to remember to grade the quality of the reviewer’s opinion and to pay the reviewer (if that is how you reward them). Letters, lists, and statistics Any computerised system should automate the routine tasks associated with sending papers to reviewers and be able to produce the necessary lists and statistics on performance that editors need to manage their journals. You will almost certainly find that you need more than one standard letter, and an option to amend the letter before it is produced – for example, to add a specific request about a particular paper – is helpful. The standard letters should, of course, always give the date by which you want the review back. Many journals print a yearly list of all the reviewers who have helped them that year. Your system therefore needs to be able to produce such a list. And you may want other routine statistics, from basics such as how many papers have been handled by your journal during a period – how many sent out for review, how many accepted, rejected, and so forth – to data on times taken at various stages. Getting the best out of reviewers Other chapters in this book discuss in some detail what works and does not work in reviewing, and how to get the best out of reviewers, PEER REVIEW IN HEALTH SCIENCES