I will survive: why peer should not rhyme with fear

What is interesting today will not necessarily be interesting tomorrow. It is not very scientific to say that your paper might well be published because you have been lucky and have timed your submission correctly. After all, the customer is always right. When you have submitted your paper to your target journal you have to arm yourself with patience and hope for the best. You are, so to speak, at the mercy of the reviewers. Reviewers come in all shapes and sizes, and some are good while others are not so good. The big journals will have a reviewer database , which lists each collaborator's field of expertise. This database expands with the editor's personal contacts, together with the never-ending flow of authors that submit their own work to the journal for publication , and who might also be considered reviewer material. Cited authors are also a good source to draw upon. A good reviewer will be knowledgeable, thorough, courteous and timely. Indeed, time is of the essence. If you do not receive an answer from your target journal several months after your submission check the standard response times in the instructions for authors, or contact the journal office and ask what is going on. The reviewers might be to blame. Reviewers that are superficial, abusive (masking can also have its bad points), or constantly miss deadlines will inevitably be removed from the journal's list or database. Of course, reviewers can sometimes misunderstand a manuscript, or maybe overlook Peer review is unavoidable if you want, amongst other things, to see your research published in a journal, thus giving you the chance to improve and develop your clinical and academic career, while making yourselves known to the rest of the bio-medical community. The term peer review is well known to every member of this community , and might be loosely defined as the scrutiny of a piece of academic work by people not involved in its creation, yet considered knowledgeable about the subject. Thousands of biomedical journals use peer review in some shape or form to help editors decide what to publish, or what not to publish. As most journals receive many more submissions than they can possibly publish, peer review is a valid way of sifting through the mire in order to identify those papers that might be considered of greatest relevance and interest to their readers, and which will …