New York Times Examines Peer-Review System Used by Medical Journals

The New York Times on Tuesday examined how a series of recent "disclosures of fraudulent or flawed studies in medical and scientific journals have called into question as never before the merits of their peer-review system." Since January 2005, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine have issued corrections, statements of concern or retractions after peer-reviewed articles published in the journals later were discredited. According to the Times, the "flurry of episodes has led many people to ask why authors, editors and independent expert reviewers all failed to detect the problems before publication." A number of factors allow such problems "to slip through" the peer-review system, such as "desire to avoid displeasing the authors and the experts who review manuscripts" and "fear that angry scientists will withhold the manuscripts that are the lifeline of the journals," the Times reports. In addition, peer reviewers "do not routinely examine authors' scientific notebooks" and often are "competitors of the authors of the papers they scrutinize, raising potential conflicts of interests," according to the Times. However, the peer-review system likely will continue because medical journals have "added to their enormous power" through promotion of the system, and scientists "favor the system in part because they need to publish or perish," the Times reports (Altman, New York Times, 5/2).