Peer Review Week 2022: Four reviewers share their views on trust and research integrity
已发布 20 九月, 2022
Peer Review Week (PRW) provides a unique opportunity to celebrate the work of peer reviewers and the essential role they play in maintaining research quality.
This year’s PRW is dedicated to the theme “Research Integrity: Creating and supporting trust in research”. During the week of 19-23 September, organisations worldwide will host events and activities to highlight the ways in which peer review reinforces confidence in scholarship.
We reached out to four peer reviewers for KeAi journals to ask them for their thoughts on this important topic. Here is what they had to say.
Have you seen public trust in research change over the course of your career?
In some ways trust has improved and in others it has declined. The media tend to seek comments from non-experts for scientific news stories. This can be counter productive and end up fueling misconceptions, leading to a decrease in trust. With this new age of social media, it is more important than ever to acknowledge and appreciate the scientific process, especially the value of effective peer review.
Do you have any personal experiences with reproducibility or research integrity you would like to share?
I regularly find methodology sections of manuscripts to be overly vague, and missing key information. Detailed information on methods can be presented in the supplementary information - it is a great place for long tables and parameters that don’t belong in the main manuscript.
How do think we can improve confidence in the peer review process?
I strongly believe unconscious bias severely hampers the peer review process. When working with female collaborators who are lead authors on manuscripts, I have noticed that reviews tend to be longer and more picky and negative. When the lead authors have a non-English sounding name, our manuscripts consistently come back with recommendations to improve the quality of the English. I don’t believe the name of the author(s) and their affiliation(s) are needed to conduct an effective peer review. Not disclosing them would help to mitigate any unconscious bias and improve confidence in the peer review process.
Have you seen public trust in research change over the course of your career?
Yes, in the last two years due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. People have started to get more familiar with scientific topics and terms and researchers are more confident about their role in society. My impression is that the fast development of a COVID-19 vaccine greatly improved the public’s trust in science and their hunger for reliable information. And fake news items have pushed people to pay more attention to information sources. Reviewers have always been fundamental in assuring the reliability of scientific discoveries and that is now more important than ever.
Do you have any personal experiences with reproducibility or research integrity you would like to share?
When you review a paper, it is important to check that the material and methods section is complete. You can always contact the paper’s author to ask for clarification or extra information. This communication can be undervalued by researchers, but I still hope that mutual help will become part of the scientific routine.
How do think we can improve confidence in the peer review process?
As I said before, communication between researchers is the key. The more you exchange ideas and work with someone, the more likely you are to trust and rely on the peer review process. A great improvement is the introduction of the option to publish the reviewers’ names with the accepted paper. For authors, knowing who evaluated their paper has the potential to improve discussions, considerations and maybe even lead to collaborations, benefitting the whole scientific community.
Have you seen public trust in research change over the course of your career?
Not much, but my colleagues tell me that over 50% of the research results reported are not reproducible.
Do you have any personal experiences with reproducibility or research integrity you would like to share?
My student in China contacted an author to question the reproducibility of their work. The author replied that the paper had been written in a way that would prevent other people from reproducing it. We need to educate our authors on this point.
How do think we can improve confidence in the peer review process?
Build up a research community for a specific research field. This will make the corresponding author cautious about what they publish, as they cannot afford to lose face in that community. Also build up a website such as https://pubpeer.com/ with artificial intelligence and robotic technologies. With the internet, Google and apps, the reputations of journals and publishers are becoming increasingly important.
Have you seen public trust in research change over the course of your career?
Yes. We now live in a world flooded with all kinds of information; related, unrelated, important, less important, useful, real and fake. This is making people more picky and critical. Moreover, more and more academic scandals have been exposed to the public. As a result, public trust in research is changing and we need to do something to rebuild the trust-based society.
Do you have any personal experiences with reproducibility or research integrity you would like to share?
As a Biotechnology researcher who focuses on CRISPR-related genome editing tool development, I have been able to reproduce most published experiments in my field. But I do notice a common issue in many papers that I review - a weak methods section! They miss necessary details and key parameters, and protocols are incomplete. As the foundation of a research paper, methods have to be solid, otherwise the entire paper is shaky.
How do think we can improve confidence in the peer review process?
We need to establish a healthy and more transparent peer review-editorial system, where reviewers can easily get credits and be recognised. Moreover, I would suggest big publishers join hands to unify their editorial management systems, which could support peer reviewers.
