Tag Archives: anonymous_reviewer

Philosophy

Peer Review Lottery

From a recent call for a conference in my mailbox ( July 17th, Orlando, Florida, KGCM 2012

Richard Smith also affirmed that regarding peer review there is “more evidence of harm than benefit…[and] Studies so far have shown that it is slow, expensive, ineffective, something of a lottery, prone to bias and abuse, and hopeless at spotting errors and fraud.”

Smith, R, 2006, “The trouble with medical journals,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 99, March, 2006, p. 116 (accessed at http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/content/99/3/115.full.pdf)

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Uncategorized

Materials and Methods

Usually “materials and methods” section is in the second paragraph; some journals put it also at the end of a paper. As a reviewer I have always insisted that this heading should be extended to “Patients, materials and methods” while in epidemiology we frequently use the term subjects (BTW epidemiologists have a rather militaristic vocabulary: recruited, cohorts :-) ). The anonymous reviewer of a previous paper now pointed out: Use the phrase “participant” throughout and not “subjects” which has reductionist connotations. I promise to use “participants” from now on, yea, yea.

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