THE EDUCATIONAL ROLE OF PEER REVIEW
IN A MEDICAL JOURNAL
FROM A DEVELOPING COUNTRY
Humberto Reyes, Ronald Kauffmann, and Max Andresen
Revista Médica de Chile, Casilla 168, Correo 55, Santiago 9, Chile
Ours is a medical journal published monthly in a developing country, covering papers by local authors in topics of internal medicine, its subspecialties, and related experimental research. Articles are published in a non-English language, with titles and abstracts translated into English. Research articles (50-55 per year) and clinical reports (45-50 per year) represent 50%-60% of published manuscripts. Since 1980 the journal follows the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Every submitted manuscript is confidentially peer-reviewed, prior to the editor's decision. Annually over 150 reviewers from a wide variety of activities-clinical investigators, learned specialists, biostatisticians, and basic scientists-participate in this process. About 23% of the manuscripts are accepted in their original version, 7% are rejected, and 70% require rewriting by the authors to comply with the editorial board criticisms. Of them, 90% are resubmitted in corrected version and accepted. We have assumed the role of guiding the authors in improving their manuscripts, instead of just deciding what is worth being published. This has meant shortening of the manuscripts (in 23% of them), a more adequate definition of objectives (16%), description of methods (17%), description of patients and selection criteria (9%), statistical analysis (17%), discussion (19%), and/or conclusions (18%). We propose that international standards of quality and the peer review system be applied by medical journals in developing countries with an educational perspective that will stimulate the diffusion of biomedical progress.
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