Reviewer's recommendations predict impact: why you have to send us your very best work.

Six months ago we acknowledged the help of many least to be more reluctant to do so in the future [8]. thousands of our reviewers who helped us with the Obviously, editors cannot afford such a loss of expert editorial decision process over the last 5 years [1]. The aim knowledge, if they aim at peer review of the large majority of editors is two-fold: they wish to make fair decisions, but of the submitted material. Although the quality of the they also want to select the best work from the submitted review process would probably benefit from disclosure of material in order to increase the esteem of their journal the identity of the reviewers [9,11], logistic reasons which is to a large extent reflected by its impact factor. prevent such a policy. Moreover, editors have to deal with page limitations. The task of editors is therefore not easy, also because reviewers in fact relatively seldomly recommend to reject a paper [2]. 2. Geographical aspects of submissions, publications, Reviewer’s reports are in general constructive and aim at reviewers and reviewer’s reports improvement of a manuscript and not at its rejection. Therefore the high rejection rates of leading journals are With the above information in hand one may wonder primarily based on priority considerations [2–4]. who should be selected as a reviewer. In the April 2000 issue we already noted [1] that the general idea that older more experienced individuals might be better in putting 1. Peer review research in perspective [12,13], although younger reviewers might be better in more detailed technical knowledge, Research of peer review is a young science with its own is not supported by facts [11]. Younger reviewers perworld congress [5–7] linked to the World Association of formed better in both aspects. Therefore we adopted as a Medical Editors (WAME). The review process is in policy to ask individuals to act as a reviewer as soon as general anonymous and the pros and cons of this have they have a paper accepted in the journal [1]. Fig. 1 shows been debated in the past in this journal [8,9] with comthe geographical distribution of original manuscripts subments from several experts [10]. The outcome of a survey mitted and published between January 1997 and December amongst both authors and reviewers was that the majority 1999, as well as that of available reviewers at the end of of both groups voted for continuation of anonymity. One 1999 and that of the frequency by which the advice of important other incentive for editors to follow such advice those reviewers for all submitted original manuscripts was is that about half of the reviewers stated that disclosure of sought between October 1997 and December 1999. Nine their names would cause them to refuse to review or at countries (the G7 countries plus Australia and the Netherlands) made up together 79.3% of all submitted manuscripts and 82.6% of all published manuscripts. The *Corresponding author. Tel.: 131-30-253-8923; fax: 131-30-253percentage of reviewers from those countries was by and 9036. E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Opthof). large the same as the percentage of publications, the