FOR THE PAST YEAR OR SO, JAMA AND THE ARCHIVES OF Internal Medicine have been involved in litigation that significantly threatened the integrity of our peer review process. We now inform our reviewers, authors, and readers about the results of this litigation that preserve the confidentiality of our peer review process. Pfizer Inc is a defendant in more than 3000 lawsuits across the country all...

Scientific peer review is pivotal in health care research in that it facilitates the evaluation of findings for competence, significance, and originality by qualified experts. While the origins of peer review can be traced to the societies of the eighteenth century, it became an institutionalized part of the scholarly process in the latter half of the twentieth century. This was a response to t...

AIMS To provide an overview of the peer review process, its various types, selection of peer reviewers, the purpose and significance of the peer review with regard to the assessment and management of quality of publications in academic journals. DESIGN Discussion paper. METHODS This paper draws on information gained from literature on the peer review process and the authors' knowledge and e...

BACKGROUND Recent controversies highlighting substandard peer review in Open Access (OA) and traditional (subscription) journals have increased the need for authors, funders, publishers, and institutions to assure quality of peer-review in academic journals. I propose that transparency of the peer-review process may be seen as an indicator of the quality of peer-review, and develop and validate...