Review

A recent British Medical Journal commentary argued about the fairest peer review system in biomedical publication.

Peer review system has been a time-honoured process of evaluating scientific manuscripts; qualified individuals within a relevant field are often invited to critique and comment upon a submitted manuscript (without monetary reward or academic recognition, in case you're interested to know) before the editors make a final decision to publish it or not.

Is it fair? Not even close. No, it's not fair; but it is a fact. Peer review is done by and large anonymously. It is never easy to be objective. The first sense to judge a manuscript is, if I'm being honest, the stomach. I'm serious. It occurs right in the pit of my stomach when I first judge a manuscript. I listen more to my stomach, far ahead of my heart of hearts, and definitely above my brain, if at all. Unsettling as it is, psychological evidence indicates that we experience our feelings toward something a split second before we can intellectualise about it.

I remember quite well my stomach feeling early this week, after accepting an invitation to review a manuscript submitted to the journal Peritoneal Dialysis International. I didn't know the authors, but my stomach tightened as soon as I read their cover letter. "On behalf of all the authors, I would like to ask you to consider our manuscript entitled XXX for publication in Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology as a case report." All at once, things began to make sense. These were people (or lazy slug, dare I say) who submitted their manuscript to a far more prestigious journal, got rejected, and submitted the whole stuff unchanged (including the cover letter) to a second medical journal.

A decision was made before I read further.