Why Medical Research Papers Have to be PEER Reviewed

The objective of a scientific research is to improve the medical knowledge and find better means of treating medical diseases. As an integral part of this process, publications in the medical journals would enable the scientific communities to share the developments and test the various findings and take it to the next level. Peer review is often considered as the integral part of the medical and academic journal publication process. In addition, it is also assumed as the best and optimum means to review the relevance, quality and the significance of the papers that are submitted by medical researchers. This would ultimately ensure that the medical treatments are effective and safe for the patient. Some of the extreme and worrying example of flawed medical manuscript or article review are the following – ● Findings which are made up. Hoax results that are given when there has been no scientific research done. ● Inconclusive and dangerous conclusions. Such findings could greatly harm the given patient as they are or came from a scientifically flawed medical method. ● Work which are plagiarized. Now sometimes certain authors would claim for a scientific work when in fact it is taken from another researcher. Peer review is not only established and prominent in other basic areas of the journal publishing and it even guides the various decisions and grants for medical research funding too. So what does this so called Peer review means? In case of medical journals, Peer review means requesting experts who are in the same field of the author or within the same Peer group to assist editors in deciding about the publication, whether to accept or reject the manuscript. This is based on the particular critique of the work. rnFrankly, there are no industrial standards that dictate the details for the Peer reviewing process, however there are plenty of debate and research which points out the pitfalls as well as the merits of this. Some of the International Journal Editorial Committee follows a voluntary procedure that is followed in most of the major medical journals and this code does have a basic rule which insist that reviewers comment has to be honest, constructive and polite. The Peer review process is most of the time blinded where the person reviewing the article won’t know who the author is. He or she won’t be having any kind of information and knowledge of the identity of the author and even the author won’t be knowing anything about the Peer reviewer too. This is designated to reduce any kind of bias decisions by making the evaluation of the merits of the paper rather than the author. rnMost of the journal publishers believe that transparency is the key factor and plays a great importance in analyzing the article. Even though the entire procedure is in an open system, still it greatly discourages the direct contact between the authors and reviewers. Some of the key aspects of the Peer review are the following – ● Peer review is a quality control procedure commonly used by medical journals. ● Basically, there are three kinds or qualities of articles that are scrutinized – relevance, quality and importance ● External experts who are from the same field of work as the author will be asked to review the content to check out the suitability for publication ● Availability of codes for conducting Peer review, however each of the medical journals have their own editorial process ● Avoiding the waste case scenario where a poor quality paper that is plagiarized, hoaxed, fabricated could lead to making dangerously fake recommendations Honestly with the assistance of Peer review, editors and editorial board members can easily reject or accept a paper or could ask for various levels of revision before it gets published or be considered for one. So there is no doubt that medical journals are indeed a great means of editing and getting relevant and journals published.