SynthesisJournal of the American Heart Association2021
Effects of Experimental Interventions to Improve the Biomedical Peer-Review Process: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
Synthesis in Journal of the American Heart Association, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis 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
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline 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
- Recognizing excellence in peer review.Experimental physiology · 2026Article
- Recognizing excellence in peer review.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Publishing sleep and chronobiology research without barriers.Npj biological timing and sleep · 2025Article
- The present and future of peer review: Ideas, interventions, and evidence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Evaluation of Peer Review of Percutaneous Coronary Intervention Operator Performance.Circulation. Cardiovascular quality and outcomes · 2025Article
- A structured, journal-led peer-review mentoring program enhances peer review training.Research integrity and peer review · 2024Article
- Analysis of gender representation, authorship inflation, and institutional affiliation in abstract acceptance: a 5-year study.Global surgical education : journal of the Association for Surgical Education · 2023Article
- Blinding of Peer Review and the Impact on Geographic Diversity of Authors in the Medical Literature.Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare · 2023Article
- Transparency of peer review: a semi-structured interview study with chief editors from social sciences and humanities.Research integrity and peer review · 2021Article
- Reviewing Peer Review.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background Quality of the peer-review process has been tested only in small studies. We describe and summarize the randomized trials that investigated interventions aimed at improving peer-review process of biomedical manuscripts. Methods and Results All randomized trials comparing different peer-review interventions at author-, reviewer-, and/or editor-level were included. Differences between traditional and intervention-modified peer-review processes were pooled as standardized mean difference (SMD) in quality based on the definitions used in the individual studies. Main outcomes assessed were quality and duration of the peer-review process. Five-hundred and seventy-five studies were retrieved, eventually yielding 24 randomized trials. Eight studies evaluated the effect of interventions at author-level, 16 at reviewer-level, and 3 at editor-level. Three studies investigated interventions at multiple levels. The effects of the interventions were reported as mean change in review quality, duration of the peer-review process, acceptance/rejection rate, manuscript quality, and number of errors detected in 13, 11, 5, 4, and 3 studies, respectively. At network meta-analysis, reviewer-level interventions were associated with a significant improvement in review quality (SMD, 0.20 [0.06 to 0.33]), at the cost of increased duration of the review process (SMD, 0.15 [0.01 to 0.29]), except for reviewer blinding. Author- and editor-level interventions did not significantly impact peer-review quality and duration (respectively, SMD, 0.17 [-0.16 to 0.51] and SMD, 0.19 [-0.40 to 0.79] for quality, and SMD, 0.17 [-0.16 to 0.51] and SMD, 0.19 [-0.40 to 0.79] for duration). Conclusions Modifications of the traditional peer-review process at reviewer-level are associated with improved quality, at the price of longer duration. Further studies are needed. Registration URL: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero; Unique identifier: CRD42020187910.
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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.