How Does One Know That an Article Has Been Peer Reviewed?

How can we be sure that a peer-reviewed journal takes seriously the opinions of its reviewers and does not send its articles to reviewers only to have an identity as a peer reviewed journals, but the real decision to publish an article is absolutely independent of reviewers’ opinions?

Hnid Karim
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I believe that it is not the responsibility of WAME to be sure how a journal runs its peer review system. We are not police. Having control over activities of other journals has not been our purpose. As is clearly described in Article II of our organization's bylaws (http://www.wame.org/wame-bylaws).

Anyway, to answer your question on peer review, to the best of my knowledge, as Dr Godlee, the editor of BMJ has mentioned, the peer review system is "expensive, slow, subjective and biased, open to abuse, patchy at detecting important methodological defects, and almost useless at detecting fraud or misconduct" and many experienced editors are practically not relying on the peer reviewers verdict to accept or reject an article. The reviewers are indeed advisors, and editors use the reviewers' comments to promote the condition of a paper if they find it publishable at all. Do not forget that ultimately, it's the editor (and to some degrees the hanging committee, if any) who is fully responsible for publication/rejection of a manuscript. A good editor certainly uses any means available to improve the quality of his/her journal.

Farrokh Habibzadeh
Secretary, WAME
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"Peer review journal” does not necessarily mean that the reviewers should make the final decisions. We ask them just to advise us mainly based on their specialties. The editor is the person who will make the final decision. And he/she makes it considering various factors—one of them can be the comments from the reviewers. Most of the time the editors share (for many reasons) their responsibilities in decision making with the journal's editorial board. They will consider the reviewers' comments; however, they need not follow them.

In any case, WAME does not have the responsibility or the power to control the process. It is a board to share the ideas and to promote the scientific medical journalism.

Behrooz Astaneh
Deputy Editor, Iranian Journal of Medical Sciences
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Yes, but there is at least one thing that WAME could do. It could recommend that each article carries a statement as to whether it has been peer reviewed, whether review was internal or external and the number of reviewers. This would not be policing, but would help to clarify an open point: peer-reviewed journals have a rarified status but what is the definition of a 'peer-reviewed' journal and how is anyone, including Thomson ISI, to know if articles in a 'peer-reviewed' journal have really been peer reviewed?

Elise Langdon-Neuner
TWS Journal of the European Medical Writers Association
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Our journals are small, but we declare on the inside covers that all articles within are peer-reviewed, and we state the names of the reviewers and their positions. This avoids such a problem as being unsure.

Vivienne Miller
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CrossRef (the people behind DOIs and the plagiarism service CrossCheck) are planning to produce just such a thing, called CrossMark. CrossMark will record for each manuscript the manner of peer review, and other things such as copyediting, translation, trial registration etc.

Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef, is managing this project.http://www.crossref.org/

Matt Hodgkinson
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Thanks, Matt—interesting

Here's the BMJ approach to this: http://resources.bmj.com/bmj/authors/article-submission

Provenance of articles - who had the idea, and was the article externally peer reviewed? At the end of every accepted editorial, research article, clinical review, practice article, analysis article, feature, and head-to-head article the BMJ will add a statement explaining the article's provenance. The options are: not commissioned; externally peer reviewed not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed commissioned; externally peer reviewed commissioned; not externally peer reviewed commissioned, based on an idea from the author; externally peer reviewed commissioned, based on an idea from the author; not externally peer reviewed

Trish Groves
Deputy editor, BMJ