Scientific peer review is pivotal in health care research in that it facilitates the evaluation
of findings for competence, significance, and originality by qualified experts. While the
origins of peer review can be traced to the societies of the eighteenth century, it became an
institutionalized part of the scholarly process in the latter half of the twentieth century. This
was a response to the growth of research and greater subject specialization. With the current
increase in the number of specialty journals, the peer review process continues to evolve to
meet the needs of patients, clinicians, and policy makers.
The peer review process itself faces challenges. Unblinded peer review might suffer from
positive or negative bias towards certain authors, specialties, and institutions. Peer review can
also suffer when editors and/or reviewers might be unable to understand the contents of the
submitted manuscript. This can result in an inability to detect major flaws, or revelations of
major flaws after acceptance of publication by the editors. Other concerns include potentially
long delays in publication and challenges uncovering plagiarism, duplication, corruption and
scientific misconduct. Conversely, a multitude of these challenges have led to claims of scientific
misconduct and an erosion of faith. These challenges have invited criticism of the peer review
process itself. However, despite its imperfections, the peer review process enjoys widespread
support in the scientific community.
Peer review bias is one of the major focuses of today’s scientific assessment of the literature.
Various types of peer review bias include content-based bias, confirmation bias, bias due to
conservatism, bias against interdisciplinary research, publication bias, and the bias of conflicts
of interest. Consequently, peer review would benefit from various changes and improvements
with appropriate training of reviewers to provide quality reviews to maintain the quality and
integrity of research without bias. Thus, an appropriate, transparent peer review is not only
ideal, but necessary for the future to facilitate scientific progress.
Key words: Scientific research, peer review process, scientific publications, peer review bias,
blinded peer review, scientific misconduct.
Journal retractions in oncology – a bibliometric study