Peer review interrater concordance of scientific abstracts: a study of anesthesiology subspecialty and component societies.

Abstracts presented at anesthesiology subspeciality and component society meetings are chosen by peer review. We assessed this process by examining selection criteria and determining interrater concordance. For the societies studied, the level of reviewer agreement ranged from poor to moderate, i.e., slightly better than by chance alone. We hypothesize that having clearer evaluation criteria, scoring systems with interval scales, and assessment based on quality can strengthen the peer review process.