A STRUCTURED REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON PEER REVIEW
Jean-Pierre Pierie, John H Hoogeveen, and John Overbeke
Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, PO Box 7591, 1070 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Objective: To investigate what original work is published on peer review.
Design: Search for articles and references of articles using the following keywords in the title for selection: adviser, peer review, decision, quality, referee, acceptance, rejection. Obvious (1 page) comments and editorials were excluded.
Results: The search of the primary sources retrieved 117 articles of which 47 turned out to be original articles on editorial peer review. Searches in MEDLINE, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Embase added 22, 14, and 3 original articles, respectively. Another 4 articles were retrieved from European Science Editing. Thirteen of the 90 articles were found to be the report of prospective studies, with various subjects concerning an aspect of the peer-review process.
Conclusions: Not too much research has been done on the editorial peer-review process. Most information (47/90) was retrieved from the primary sources and only a small proportion (13/90) are prospective studies. Additional (randomized) research of the editorial peer-review process is needed.
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