Trial reportBMC medical education2012
Does mentoring new peer reviewers improve review quality? A randomized trial.
Trial report in BMC medical education, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Effects of Experimental Interventions to Improve the Biomedical Peer-Review Process: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2021Pooled it
- Co-reviewing and ghostwriting by early-career researchers in the peer review of manuscripts.eLife · 2019Pooled it
- Impact of interventions to improve the quality of peer review of biomedical journals: a systematic review and meta-analysis.BMC medicine · 2016Pooled it
- From rejection to formative development: recalibrating decisions for under-resourced authors.ESMO real world data and digital oncology · 2026Review
- Effectiveness of the researcher-led "Peerspectives" peer review training course on review quality, knowledge, and skills among doctoral students in the biomedical sciences: a pre-post study.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- A structured, journal-led peer-review mentoring program enhances peer review training.Research integrity and peer review · 2024Article
- The inauguralmBio · 2024Article
- Reviewer training for improving grant and journal peer review.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2023Article
- Preprint Peer Review Enhances Undergraduate Biology Students' Disciplinary Literacy and Sense of Belonging in STEM.Journal of microbiology & biology education · 2023Article
- Fighting reviewer fatigue or amplifying bias? Considerations and recommendations for use of ChatGPT and other large language models in scholarly peer review.Research integrity and peer review · 2023Article
- Fighting reviewer fatigue or amplifying bias? Considerations and recommendations for use of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models in scholarly peer review.Research square · 2023Article
- Investing in the Academic Writing: Training Future Reviewers and Sustaining Efficient and Quality Peer Review.Cureus · 2022Review
- Peer review analyze: A novel benchmark resource for computational analysis of peer reviews.PloS one · 2022Article
- How to bring peer review ghostwriters out of the dark.Molecular biology of the cell · 2021Article
- Training patients to review scientific reports for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute: an observational study.BMJ open · 2019Observational
- Academic Primer Series: Key Papers About Peer Review.The western journal of emergency medicine · 2017Review
- Editors' Perspectives on Enhancing Manuscript Quality and Editorial Decisions Through Peer Review and Reviewer Development.American journal of pharmaceutical education · 2017Article
- Ensuring the Quality, Fairness, and Integrity of Journal Peer Review: A Possible Role of Editors.Science and engineering ethics · 2016Article
- Peer review: tips from field experts for junior reviewers.BMC medicine · 2015Article
- Editorial: peer review and the editorial process--a look behind the curtain.Clinical orthopaedics and related research · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundPrior efforts to train medical journal peer reviewers have not improved subsequent review quality, although such interventions were general and brief. We hypothesized that a manuscript-specific and more extended intervention pairing new reviewers with high-quality senior reviewers as mentors would improve subsequent review quality.
methodsOver a four-year period we randomly assigned all new reviewers for Annals of Emergency Medicine to receive our standard written informational materials alone, or these materials plus a new mentoring intervention. For this program we paired new reviewers with a high-quality senior reviewer for each of their first three manuscript reviews, and asked mentees to discuss their review with their mentor by email or phone. We then compared the quality of subsequent reviews between the control and intervention groups, using linear mixed effects models of the slopes of review quality scores over time.
resultsWe studied 490 manuscript reviews, with similar baseline characteristics between the 24 mentees who completed the trial and the 22 control reviewers. Mean quality scores for the first 3 reviews on our 1 to 5 point scale were similar between control and mentee groups (3.4 versus 3.5), as were slopes of change of review scores (-0.229 versus -0.549) and all other secondary measures of reviewer performance.
conclusionsA structured training intervention of pairing newly recruited medical journal peer reviewers with senior reviewer mentors did not improve the quality of their subsequent reviews.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.