Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
Soc Sci Med. 2011 Apr;72(7):1056-63. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.02.002. Epub 2011 Feb 18.
Peer- and editorial review of research submitted to biomedical journals ('manuscript review') is frequently argued to be essential for ensuring scientific quality and the dissemination of important ideas, but there is also broad agreement that manuscript review is often unsuccessful in achieving its goals. Problems with manuscript review are frequently attributed to the social and subjective dimensions of the process (e.g., bias and conflict of interest). While there have been numerous efforts to improve the process, these have had limited success. This may be because these efforts do not account sufficiently for all of the social and subjective dimensions of the process. We set out, therefore, to characterise the most salient social and subjective dimensions of the manuscript review process, from the perspective of practising reviewers and editors. Open-ended interviews were carried out with 35 journal editors, and peer reviewers in the U.K., U.S.A. and Australia. It emerged from these interviews that reviewers and editors were conscious of a number of social and subjective influences on the review process including: a wide variety of motivations for participation, complex relations of power, epistemic authority and moral responsibility, and unavoidable prejudice and intuition. Importantly, these social and subjective influences were often viewed positively and were seen as expressions of, rather than threats to, editors' and reviewers' epistemic authority and expertise. From this we conclude that the social and subjective dimensions of biomedical manuscript review should be made more explicit, accommodated and even encouraged, not only because these dimensions of human relationships and judgements are unavoidable, but because their explicit presence is likely to enrich, rather than threaten the manuscript review process. We suggest a 'dialectical' model which can simultaneously accommodate, and embrace, all dimensions of the manuscript review process.
同行评审和编辑审查提交给生物医学期刊的研究（“稿件审查”）通常被认为对于确保科学质量和传播重要思想至关重要，但也广泛认为稿件审查在实现其目标方面往往不成功。稿件审查存在问题通常归因于该过程的社会和主观层面（例如，偏见和利益冲突）。尽管已经做出了许多努力来改进该过程，但收效甚微。这可能是因为这些努力没有充分考虑到该过程的所有社会和主观层面。因此，我们着手从审稿人和编辑的角度来描述稿件审查过程中最突出的社会和主观层面。我们对来自英国、美国和澳大利亚的 35 位期刊编辑和同行审稿人进行了开放式访谈。访谈结果表明，审稿人和编辑意识到审稿过程中存在许多社会和主观影响，包括：参与的动机多种多样、权力关系复杂、认识权威和道德责任、以及不可避免的偏见和直觉。重要的是，这些社会和主观影响通常被视为编辑和审稿人认识权威和专业知识的表现，而不是威胁。因此，我们得出结论，生物医学稿件审查的社会和主观层面应该更加明确、适应甚至鼓励，不仅因为这些人际关系和判断的维度是不可避免的，而且因为它们的明确存在可能会丰富而不是威胁稿件审查过程。我们提出了一种“辩证”模型，可以同时容纳和接受稿件审查过程的所有维度。
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