Please join us to celebrate Peer Review Week at Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. At this lunchtime event, we'll view and discuss a recording of the Peer Review Congress plenary lecture by Dr Simine Vazire, professor at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia.

Journal Prestige Can and Should Be Earned

Scientific institutions, including journals, should work to earn trust from the scientific community and from the public. With prominent threats to trust in science around the world, it is especially important to make clear why scientific institutions are worthy of trust. Too often, journals’ reputations are unearned—based on flawed metrics, such as impact factors—or simply the inertia of prestige. But journal prestige can and should be earned.

There are many things journals can do to give the community concrete, verifiable indicators of their priorities. First, journals can thoroughly vet the articles they publish to ensure they are accurate, well-calibrated, and transparently reported. Second, journals can invest in postpublication critique and correction so that when they inevitably publish some things that are wrong or miscalibrated, they correct themselves. Third, journals can encourage audits of their published articles, such as those conducted by the Institute for Replication.

Scientific journals will sometimes publish research that turns out to be wrong. That is not a reason to distrust journals or the peer review process. But journals do have an obligation to take reasonable steps to vet research before it is published and to make those efforts visible and verifiable to readers. Journals that invest in and facilitate both prepublication and postpublication quality checks, error detection, and correction are the ones that deserve the most trust and the most prestige.

We are grateful to Dr Vazire and the Peer Review Congress organizers (JAMA Network, BMJ, and METRICS) for allowing us to screen this recording, which will become available publicly in several months. 

You are invited to bring your lunch (but nothing messy, please!)