ArticlePeerJ2024
Structured peer review: pilot results from 23 Elsevier journals.
Article in PeerJ, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Integrating community Live Reviews into academic publishing: an exploratory study.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Article
- Paying peer reviewers: benefits, risks, and challenges.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2026Review
- Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Reviewers rarely comment on the same aspects of a manuscript, making it difficult to properly assess manuscripts' quality and the quality of the peer review process. The goal of this pilot study was to evaluate structured peer review implementation by: 1) exploring whether and how reviewers answered structured peer review questions, 2) analysing reviewer agreement, 3) comparing that agreement to agreement before implementation of structured peer review, and 4) further enhancing the piloted set of structured peer review questions. Methods: Structured peer review consisting of nine questions was piloted in August 2022 in 220 Elsevier journals. We randomly selected 10% of these journals across all fields and IF quartiles and included manuscripts that received two review reports in the first 2 months of the pilot, leaving us with 107 manuscripts belonging to 23 journals. Eight questions had open-ended fields, while the ninth question (on language editing) had only a yes/no option. The reviews could also leave Results: Almost all the reviewers ( Conclusions: Our preliminary results indicate that reviewers successfully adapted to the new review format, and that they covered more topics than in their traditional reports. Individual question analysis indicated the greatest disagreement regarding the interpretation of the results and the conducting and the reporting of statistical analyses. While structured peer review did lead to improvement in reviewer final recommendation agreements, this was not a randomized trial, and further studies should be performed to corroborate this. Further research is also needed to determine whether structured peer review leads to greater knowledge transfer or better improvement of manuscripts.
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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.