Indicating Sections That Are Not Peer-Reviewed

Some sections of our peer-reviewed journal are not peer reviewed, such as association news, book reviews, and practice articles. While we state this clearly in our Instructions to Authors, a senior member of our editorial staff has asked that we mark these specific pages with an icon—each month—as being non-peer reviewed. I have not seen this before and wonder if it is overkill.

Is anyone familiar with this?

Jennifer Herendeen
Editorial Director, Journal, American Dietetic Association
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In your list, the only thing that I can tell that may need that disclosure statement would be the practice articles. But rather than have to put the non-peer reviewed disclosure statement at the beginning of each issue’s practice articles section, I would just make sure they pass through some sort of peer review. Easily solved.

Kimberly Fradette-Taylor
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Does sound a bit over the top, Jennifer. We certainly don't do that—we tend to assume that our readers are intelligent enough to appreciate the difference between items of news/opinion, and academic papers.

Bob Bury
Clinical Radiology
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I think this raises an important issue. Some journals do not peer review review articles and other articles that you might expect a journal that calls itself a 'peer review' journal to peer review. Therefore, it would be a good idea to identify articles that have not been peer reviewed.

Elise Langdon-Neuner
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Regarding your book review section, you might want to preface that section with the typical disclaimer, something such as—“The following views are not that of the ADA.” This serves a couple of purposes—and one of my favorites is that it doesn’t make the organization and editor-in-chief feel as if they must sanitize reviews that may be critical, against their general opinions, or not aligned with the org’s goals.

Kimberly