Professional
Professional peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. In academia, peer review is used to inform decisions related to faculty advancement and tenure.8
A prototype professional peer review process was recommended in the Ethics of the Physician written by Ishāq ibn ʻAlī al-Ruhāwī (854–931). He stated that a visiting physician had to make duplicate notes of a patient's condition on every visit. When the patient was cured or had died, the notes of the physician were examined by a local medical council of other physicians, who would decide whether the treatment had met the required standards of medical care.9
Professional peer review is common in the field of health care, where it is usually called clinical peer review.10 Further, since peer review activity is commonly segmented by clinical discipline, there is also physician peer review, nursing peer review, dentistry peer review, etc.11 Many other professional fields have some level of peer review process: accounting,12 law,1314 engineering (e.g., software peer review, technical peer review), aviation, and even forest fire management.15
Peer review is used in education to achieve certain learning objectives, particularly as a tool to reach higher order processes in the affective and cognitive domains as defined by Bloom's taxonomy. This may take a variety of forms, including closely mimicking the scholarly peer review processes used in science and medicine.1617
Scholarly
This section is an excerpt from Scholarly peer review.[edit]
Scholarly peer review or academic peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of having a researcher's methods and findings reviewed (usually anonymously) by experts (or "peers") in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher (i.e., the editor-in-chief, the editorial board, or the program committee) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph, or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.
Academic peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) academic field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is widely used to increase academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals. However, criticism of peer review include failure to prevent publication of invalid research or scientific fraud,18 low correlation with future impact,19 slowness,20 and lack of accountability.21
Top journals reject over 90% of submitted papers.22
Medical
Main article: Clinical peer review
Medical peer review may be distinguished in four classifications:23
- Clinical peer review is a procedure for assessing a patient's involvement with experiences of care. It is a piece of progressing proficient practice assessment and centered proficient practice assessment—significant supporters of supplier credentialing and privileging.24
- Peer evaluation of clinical teaching skills for both physicians and nurses.2526
- Scientific peer review of journal articles.
- A secondary round of peer review for the clinical value of articles concurrently published in medical journals.27
Additionally, "medical peer review" has been used by the American Medical Association to refer not only to the process of improving quality and safety in health care organizations, but also to the process of rating clinical behavior or compliance with professional society membership standards.2829 The clinical network believes it to be the most ideal method of guaranteeing that distributed exploration is dependable and that any clinical medicines that it advocates are protected and viable for individuals. Thus, the terminology has poor standardization and specificity, particularly as a database search term.30
Technical
Main article: Technical peer review
In engineering, technical peer review is a type of engineering review. Technical peer reviews are a well-defined review process for finding and fixing defects, conducted by a team of peers with assigned roles. Technical peer reviews are carried out by peers representing areas of life cycle affected by material being reviewed (usually limited to 6 or fewer people). Technical peer reviews are held within development phases, between milestone reviews, on completed products or completed portions of products.31
Governmental
Further information: U.S. Government peer review policies
The European Union has been using peer review in the "Open Method of Co-ordination" of policies in the fields of active labour market policy since 1999.32 In 2004, a program of peer reviews started in social inclusion.33 Each program sponsors about eight peer review meetings in each year, in which a "host country" lays a given policy or initiative open to examination by half a dozen other countries and the relevant European-level NGOs. These usually meet over two days and include visits to local sites where the policy can be seen in operation. The meeting is preceded by the compilation of an expert report on which participating "peer countries" submit comments. The results are published on the web.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, through UNECE Environmental Performance Reviews, uses peer review, referred to as "peer learning", to evaluate progress made by its member countries in improving their environmental policies.
The State of California is the only U.S. state to mandate scientific peer review. In 1997, the Governor of California signed into law Senate Bill 1320 (Sher), Chapter 295, statutes of 1997, which mandates that, before any CalEPA Board, Department, or Office adopts a final version of a rule-making, the scientific findings, conclusions, and assumptions on which the proposed rule are based must be submitted for independent external scientific peer review. This requirement is incorporated into the California Health and Safety Code Section 57004.34
Criticism of professional peer review
Further information: Scholarly peer review § Criticism
A particular concern in peer review is "role duality" as people are in parallel in the role of being an evaluator and being evaluated.35 Research illustrates that taking on both roles in parallel biases people in their role as evaluators as they engage in strategic actions to increase the chance of being evaluated positively themselves.35
The editorial peer review process has been found to be strongly biased against studies with null results. "Who wants to read something that doesn't work?" asks Richard Smith in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. "That's boring." This publication bias then biases the information base of science and medicine.36
Peer reviewing can lead to conflicts between peer reviewers.37
The (possibly not declared) use of artificial intelligence to assist or perform the process of peer review has been confirmed by interviews in a survey by Nature.38 There are a few documented cases of scholars who inserted human-invisible prompts in their preprints in order to favour a positive review in case of an automated refereeing process.39
Improvement and alternatives
Various alternatives to peer review have been suggested such as, in the context of science funding, funding-by-lottery.40 Registered reports41 and peer-replication can mitigate the replication crisis.42 Adversarial systems can reduce ideological biases.43
